If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

It was announced this week that June 2009 marked the end of the recession, which lasted for 18 months, the longest recession on record since WWII.

The United Auto Workers are calling for a boycott of Chase Financial services since they will not stop their foreclosures.

The government is looking to sell portions of GM to China. Taxpayers own 61% of GM. It has also come out that GM, partially kept afloat by taxpayer money, is making political donations now.

Coincidentally enough, the first time the President Obama goes to church, the speaker is a Muslim.

Republican governor candidate Paladino recently sent out a mailer about how politicians were stinking things up in Albany. The mailer itself smelled like landfill.

A Pakistan International Airlines jet carrying 273 people bound from Canada for Pakistan landed Saturday at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport because of a bomb threat on board, airport and police officials said. I do not know what the person’s race or religion, but let me venture a guess....

Iran President Ahmadinejad, while speaking at the UN, suggests that the United States ought to look into U.S. government involvement in 9/11.

Larry Summers is resigning from his economic advisory post in the White House. This is ¾^ths of Obama’s original economic team (Tim Geithner remains).

On the international scene, Hillary Clinton has a stove designed for 3^rd world nations, which causes less carbon emissions. The U.S. will pay for the stoves.

KFC is marketing its bunless sandwiches on the bun of college coeds, who wear sweat pants with the KFC sandwich namedouble-down on backside of the sweat pants.

The New York Times reported that the White House was discussing running ads against the TEA party and how it has taken over the Republican party. The White House denies this assertion.

An official report released this week says an ACORN offshoot—Affordable Housing Centers of America—cannot properly account for how it has spent millions of federal dollars and recommends that the group repay the government and be put on standby mode until it cleans up its act.

Steve Colbert showed up to Congress, in character, to give his opinion of illegal immigration. He essentially did a bit and even John Conyers finally asked him to leave.

The Bell City, CA officials—the ones who took those outrageous salaries—have been arrested.

President Obama: "Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land." Spain originally conquered and colonized New Spain in 1521, and Mexicans gained their independence in 1821, almost 50 years after American became an sovereign nation.

Newsweek's Howard Fineman said, "Barack Obama probably should have joined a church here...some things in politics you have to do at least for the symbolism."

Bill Clinton: "The people that are funding this Tea Party are trying to weaken the government. so that they can have unaccountable private power." On another occasion, he said, “The wealthy are funding these TEA parties so that the big companies can run American life.” [the second quote is form memory].

Rep. Loretta Sanchez speaking in Spanish to a Spanish speaking audience: “The Vietnamese and the Republicans are, with an intensity, trying to take away this seat, this seat that we have done so much for our community; take away this seat from us and give it to this Van Tran, who’s very anti-immigrant and very anti-Latino.” Tran is an immigrant from Vietnam. Sanchez has since apologized for these remarks. She said that she "used a poor choice of words that some people have taken as offensive."

John Kerry: "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."

Ed Schultz: “What we are seeing from this governor out of New Jersey is just, go to the money, cut whoever you have to cut, there is no ramification for any of this, because he’s a cold-hearted fat slob anyway.”

Radio Host Mike Malloy : “Back to Cheney, whose father is responsible for every single death in Iraq, since the invasion and occupation that he championed in 2003...he is responsible for the deaths in Afghanistan...he is responsible for the death in New York City [and] the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. Dick Cheney is one of the bloodiest sons of bitches ever to have held power...in this government...you oughtta be out there planning your father’s funeral, Liz...do at least one thing in your useless life that will have some meaning; go plan his funeral.”

Speaking of incendiary remarks, Chris Redfern said, in reference to those TEA party members who opposed healthcare, said: "If your kids are going to graduate from college, now he or she gets health care, your heath care, while he or she looks for a new job. It's in the very base terms we win these arguments. Every time one of these f**** says, excuse my language..." [I don’t have the rest of the quote] He later sent an email to supporters with the heading, No Apologies. Part of the email reads “These [TEA party] tactics have no place in our politics, and I will NEVER apologize for speaking out forcefully against them.”

Adrianna Huffington [about people who support Christine O’Donnell]: “We have a lot of surveys that show people are making decisions from their lizard brains, and when people operate from their lizard brains which means they're operating from anger, from fear, from panic. They're not operating from rationality. Who knows what they will decide? I don't know what's going to happen.”

Liberal talk show host Bill Press: “I tell you the other thing, Ed, the fact that Glenn Beck likes Chris Christie? Of course he does. He's a bully too. You've got people every night on this show that disagree with you, and you have a good dialogue. Have ever heard anybody or seen anybody who disagrees on Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity? No. They're all bullies, they're all cowards, they're all alike. That's why they like Christie.”

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane [about his desire to have rough sex with Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell]: "I would, I would wreck that chick." [The idiom comes from a Family Guy episode].

Maureen Dowd: “Evolution is no myth, but we may be evolving backward. Christine O'Donnell had better hope they don't bring back witch burning.”

Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Speaker of the House: “The momentum is with us. We are out there to dispel many of the misrepresentations that have been going out there for nearly two years by the Republicans and the special interests, the oil industry, the health insurance industry, the banks and their allies. We're out there. Our members are great articulate spokespersons for their point of view into their districts. And district by district we feel very confident about the election. And we believe that six weeks from today, six weeks from Wednesday of this week we will have no regrets but instead we will have a great Democratic victory.”

Senator Harry Reid calls New York state's junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, "the hottest member" of the U.S. Senate.

Jon Stewart on his gathering: “We will gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. A million moderate march, where we take to the streets to send a message to our leaders and our national media that says, "We are here! We're here, though, until six, because we have a sitter!”

Colin Powell: "[Illegal aliens are] all over my house, doing things whenever I call for repairs, and I'm sure you've seen them at your house." He has since walked these remarks back by clarifying them.

Chris Matthews: “I have one small tweak to make to what the president said today - he should stop saying that giving people tax cuts is giving people money. It`s their money! A tax cut is when the government doesn’t take our money. It`s an important distinction. He talked today, for example, about people getting a check from the government in the form of a tax cut. That`s not the way it works. If tax rates are kept lower, it`s a matter of the check going to the government being smaller.”

Question for Obama from a supporter: “I'm one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for. My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but, quite frankly, it's starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we're headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?”

Steve Colbert: "We've ignored this issue [or exploited aliens] for way too long. It's time to roll up our sleeves and face this issue mano to - whatever the Spanish word for `mano' is."

Gavin Newoms: “That is not something that I'm proud to say as a Democrat, it's not something I want to say, but it's true...It's not wrong to criticize parts of that stimulus as disproportionately saving jobs in the public sector and not stimulating private sector economic growth.”

Jim DeMint: “I don’t want the [Republican] majority back if we don’t believe anything. When I came in to the Senate, we had 55 Senators, a large majority in the House and a Republican in the White house. We didn’t do what we said we were going to do.”

Christine O’Donnell: “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

While the round table fretted about the so-called Civil War within the Republican Party, George Will (as usual) brings some sanity and clear thinking to the table: “At the beginning of the year, the question was, will the Tea Party people play nicely with others and will they obey the rules of politics? Who's sort of not playing nicely? Mr. Crist starts losing the primary to a Tea Party favorite Rubio. He suddenly discovers that he's an independent and changes all his views overnight. Mrs. Murkowski loses a primary and suddenly discovers that she has a property right in her Senate seat and she's going to run as a write-in. Senator Bennett thought of that in Utah, Senator Castle in Delaware is thinking of a write-in candidate. Who are the extremists?”

Noel Sheppard writes: “As [George] Will accurately stated, the media have been ‘writing this story for eight months about what a problem

the Tea Party is for the Republican Party.’ The liberal press are always trying to figure out a narrative that paints the GOP in the most negative light. First we were told the Tea Party represented an inconsequential fringe of racists and homophobes that will have no impact on elections. Now that its candidates have produced shocking results across the fruited plain, and have reinvigorated conservative voters like nothing we've seen in many years, the movement is going to produce a Civil War within the Republican Party that will either hurt it in November or make it impossible for it to govern if its successful at the polls. This is clearly why you could see Will either shaking his head or seemingly laughing to himself as his colleagues waxed philosophically about some as yet unrealized though oft-predicted calamity associated with this movement. Less than two years after Barack Obama and the Democrat Party won a landslide victory that had the potential of being a political realignment shifting the balance of power in this country to the left for many years nay decades, the Republicans are on the precipice of shocking the world by taking back the Congress. Is it any wonder the media are doing their darnedest to figure out a way to undermine it or that Will is getting such a kick out of watching them try?”

Chris Christie: “I had an Irish father and I had, before she passed away 6 years ago, a Sicilian mother. Now, for those of you who have been exposed to the combination of Irish and Sicilian—it has made me not unfamiliar with conflict. I my house, my parents left nothing unsaid; we heard most of it, and most of it was at a pretty high volume.”

Ben Stein (tongue-in-cheek): “Aces to Oliver Stone for standing up for Hitler.”

Mike Murphy: “Jerry Brown is a time machine back to failure.” (Quoted from memory)

Charles Krauthammer: “The president has delivered more for liberalism in a year and a half than any president in 50 years. He's given them national health care. He's given them heavy regulation on finance. He gave them $1 trillion to spend on every wish list that liberals have had for the last 20 years. He has given them two appointments for the Supreme Court, each of which will yield a quarter-century of liberal opinions. He bailed out unions in the auto takeover. He bailed out the teachers' unions just this week by supporting state and local governments. He has given them everything he could possibly do - and they're [liberals are] whining about him? It's unbelievable.”

Michael Eden (on Obama’s recent townhall meeting): “It was billed as Investing In America...But it sounded like a therapy session for disillusioned Obama supporters.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan": "Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done. He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse."

Mitt Romney: “We have serious enemies and growing threats throughout the world. Unfortunately, we have an administration whose idea of a rogue state is Arizona.”

Reza Kahlili was a member of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and worked as a spy for the CIA during the 1980s and 1990s. He know lives in the U.S. He writes in Forbes:

"Ahmadinejad knows precisely what he is doing. He's getting his information from the Quran, which directs Muslims to deceive their enemies until such time as they are strong enough to destroy the infidels. It is a shame that the media in America provides him with an avenue for this deception. Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to pursue its failed policy and its sanctions while still offering to negotiate with the Iranian leaders who not only have the blood of Iranian on their hands but also the blood of our heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West can no longer claim it is the defender of democracy and freedom when it chooses to close its eyes to the heinous crimes of the Islamic Republic. It can no longer claim to be the guiding light for the freedom loving people of the world when it turns its back on the aspirations of millions in Iran who are shedding their blood to fight for freedom. What are the Iranians to think when they see their criminal leaders welcomed as dignitaries in the West?"

Great inspiring video; it’s short (3 min.), but it is effective. Go full screen to read it all. No large organization put this together, by the way.

I have not listed any of Glenn Beck’s shows for the past 2 weeks because none of them were that good (in my opinion). Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday’s shows were excellent:

Here is Andrew Breitbart talking to the protestors who were bussed in to protest a meeting that he and Glenn Beck hosted. Much better audio and pictures than the last Breitbart vid.

Jodi Miller: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi feels certain that Democrats will keep control of the house, unless there is an election or something.”

Jodi Miller: “Sarah Palin’s recent speech in Iowa suggests that she may be running for president in 2012. Another sign is that the network news organizations are now hiring people in their Let’s make up stuff about Sarah Palin department.”

Jodi Miller: “Jon Stewart announced plans for his own march on Washington called Restoring Sanity. And, as expect, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson announced their own counter demonstration on the same day. It’s called, Keeping Insanity Alive.”

Dennis Miller: “I always wondered what it was like to live in Rome under the Ceasar’s, but I thank Carter for allowing me to see it up close from that 4½ mile line at the gas pump...I know it was only a one-term presidency, but it was so bad, so noxious, that it had a linger to it. I think of the Carter presidency as a fart in a smart car; it’s there, it’s not going away, and it’s unpleasant...in the rearview, Billy is starting to look like the savant of the family. The guy is so inept, he got attacked by a swimming rabbit.; the swimming rabbit looked up and said, ‘This guy is such a dunce, I think I can take him.’ ”

Dennis Miller on the Delaware Senate race: “I’ve condensed it down to a bumper sticker, Bewitched vs. Bewildered; and you know something, I’m going to go with Endora because the other guy, the bald guy, thinks everybody’s caldron should be exactly the same size.”

Dennis Miller: “I see people walking their vote back from Obama all the time. It’s like they took an ambien and woke up naked outside. They can’t believe they did it and they are frightened that they might do it again.”

1) Rush Limbaugh has made the point that, when the Democrat party platform sounds a lot like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you might want to make some revisions.

2) Have you noticed a lot of Bill and Hillary lately? Do you think that is just a coincidence? If you watch the Sunday talk shows, they are showing up more often than before. Now and again, you turn to a news broadcast, and there is Bill telling you like it is. Now and again, they tweak Obama’s policies. Now, why do you suppose that is?

3) Do you wonder why there has been a problem with more settlements in Israel? That means more Jews who need more houses. That is what has the angry Arabs even more angry.

4) When it comes to picking a Senator or a Representative (as opposed to a mayor, governor or President), the key is how they vote. Whether they have been married or divorced 20 times or were wiccans as teens are not true issues. The only character issue is, will they vote how they say they are going to vote; and if they be bribed. Everything else is unimportant. There is healthcare, taxes, cap and trade, government spending, etc. As a voter, you need to choose the person who would vote as you would.

5) Speaking of people who face meaningless issues is Christine O’Donnell, the Senate TEA party candidate who won her primary. Now there are videos out saying that she attended some wiccan meetings, and there have been questions—mostly bogus—about her taxes, house payment and alleged lack of employment. I have heard another conservative Republican actually claim that she will bring the party down. O’Donnell will vote against cap and trade, against excessive government spending, and for a balanced budget. That is all that concerns me. If she wants to sacrifice goats in the backyard of a house that is being foreclosed upon, I am less concerned about that.

6) Dick Morris suggested that she have a commercial with the song “Witchcraft” playing in the background. The text is, “Christine O’Donnell had some friends in high school who were into witchcraft. Today, Coons, her opponent, favors high deficit spending. O’Donnell does not. You choose.”

7) Did you here that the White House believes that, not only were Ahmadinejad’s remarks about 9/11 offensive, but it was worse that he spoke these words so close to the site of the fallen twin towers. Now, if Obama could just recognize that the problem with the Ground Zero mosque is where it is.

8) Speaking of the Ground Zero mosque, I have no problem with it being built right there, after the Twin Towers are completed. At that point, it will have no political meaning.

9) I wish I could recall who said this, this past week (maybe it was on O’Reilly’s show?). But they said it was very likely that marijuana would be legalized, because it chemically turned people into Democrats.

10) If the Democrat agenda is so good, why are there no Democrats running on it this year?

11) At a fund raiser, Obama warned the people that Republicans would cut AIDS funding. George Bush tripled what fed spent on AIDS.

12) Christine O’Donnell and others have spoken of disbanding the Department of Education. This is portrayed as a radical view. Remember, Carter started this department, and most every president since Carter, Democrat and Republican, doubled-down on this concept. Now, has education improved since then? We need a brand new model for education, and it needs to be more individualized, not more centralized.

13) ¾^ths of Obama’s original economic team has left the White House. Always remember, when it came to economic policies, Obama started with carte blanc and he passed the largest spending bill ever enacted in our country. Today, more people believe that Elvis is alive than believe that the Stimulus Bill worked. No matter who offers up a stimulus package in the future, remember it’s been done on many occasions, but with few results.

14) Do you know that within the healthcare bill, there are 3 interesting provisions: (1) The government is now in charge of all student loans. (2) If you are a business and you do $600 worth of business with any one person or organization, then you will, in 2012, have to begin sending in 1099 tax forms for each of these. If you have even moderately complex taxes, you know that this will add hours and hours and mounds of paperwork to these large and small businesses. (3) When you sell your house, there will be a 3.8% tax which goes to the government, in many cases.

15) Shepard Fairey, the creator of the iconic Obama hope poster, has recently expressed his disappointment with the president

14 days: how long these tax cuts for the rich would run the federal government.

Democrats have raked in more than $400,000 just from employees of the University of California's network of colleges - 86 percent of all donations from UC employees.

Harvard employees ranked second in donations to Democrats, giving $327,028 to the party - 77 percent of total donations from employees of the university.

Murkowski was defeated in the Alaskan Republican primary. She is running as a write-in candidate. 88% of her support is coming from outside of Alaska.

President Obama has a fund raiser in New York City in the Roosevelt Hotel. There were only 650 seats, which first sold for $100 each and then were lowered to $50 each. 450 seats were filled.

59% of adults say instead that the foreclosures are due to people buying a home they couldn't afford.

Have you noticed how much press is concentrated on dredging up of Christine O’Donnell’s background, no matter how meaningless and inconsequential, and calling into question many things which have perfectly good explanations? Where is the media on her opponent? Quick, what is his name?

No doubt you heard that President Obama went to church. Did you hear who the speaker was?

SNL was quite effective at smearing Sarah Palin, probably more than the news. Voters actually thought that she said, “I can see Russian from my house.”

So, where is a photo of the “Fire Pelosi” bus? I could not find a single image of it on Google images. Is there no news organization out there with this bus photographed?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be giving his insane speech, except that it lines up exactly with the Democratic platform.

It is interesting how SNL is only “edgy” when Republicans are in power. Then they attack those in power. Even their Bill Clinton was quite likeable.

For running on conservative ideas; but will any of these candidates actually hold to these same ideals if in office? Some did; most did not.

We don’t want to go backwards to tried and failed Republican ideas [which still seemed to work better than his ideas]

With very few exceptions, Democrats are running on a conservative, Republican platform.

There is no slogan, no unifying principle, no Democratic platform of the upcoming election.

Jon Stewart’s rally will be much smaller than Beck’s, and he will claim, “People were at work or they couldn’t get a sitter.” (Which is what he is saying now, to lower expectations). My guess is, in the tens of thousands.

Bill and Hillary’s expanded coverage on the Sunday talk circuit and elsewhere is Hillary gently throwing down the gauntlet to challenge President Obama in 2012. So far, they have not said anything that they can’t take back; but now and again, there is a little dig against Obama.

There are more and more Democrats coming out with conservative, Republican messages.

NY Times comes out with a story about how Democrats are looking for dirt on their rivals.

I assumed that Michael Steele would suddenly leave the Republican party leadership after making that dumb remark about Afghanistan; I was wrong.

Last week, I mistakenly referred to an Obama quote as coming from the preamble of the constitution, but it was actually from the Declaration of Independence (how did I screw that one up? I memorized this in high school).

Also, Castle did call Christine O’Donnell on Friday a week ago. I was not aware of this call and misreported that he had not contacted her.

Obama—the Most Powerful and Accomplished President Since FDR (although this is a true headline, in my opinion, it would require the press to then explain what Obama has done)

There is so much political spin, and so many numbers games being played, when it comes to medical care, that we have to go back to square one and the simplest common sense, in order to get some rational idea of what government-run medical care means. In particular, we need to examine the claim that the government can "bring down the cost of medical care."

The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.

Despite these facts, most of us tend to take a somewhat more parochial view of the situation when it is we ourselves who are sick or who face a potentially fatal illness. But what if that decision is taken out of your hands under ObamaCare and is being made for you by a bureaucrat in Washington?

We won't know what that leads to until the time comes. As Nancy Pelosi said, we will find out what is in the bill after it has passed. But even now, after ObamaCare has been passed, not many people want to read its 2,400 pages. Even if you did, you would still not know what it would be like in practice, after more than 150 boards and commissions issue their specific regulations.

Fortunately- in fact, very fortunately- you don't have to slog through 2,400 pages of legalistic jargon or turn to a fortune teller to divine the future. A new book, "The Truth About ObamaCare" by Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute lays out the facts in the plainest English.

While she can't tell you the future, she can tell you enough about government-run medical systems in other countries that it will not take a rocket scientist to figure out what is in store for us if ObamaCare doesn't get repealed before it takes full effect in 2014. It is not a pretty picture.

We hear a lot about how wonderful it is that the Canadians or the British or the Swedes get free medical treatment because the government runs the system. But we don't hear much about the quality of that medical care.

We don't hear about more than 4,000 expectant mothers who gave birth inside a hospital, but not in the maternity ward, in Britain in just one year.

British newspapers have for years carried stories about the neglect of patients under the National Health Service, of which this is just one. When nurses don't get around to taking a pregnant woman to the maternity ward in time, the baby doesn't wait.

But the American media don't tell you about such things when they are gushing over the wonders of "universal health care" that will "bring down the cost of medical care."

Instead, the media spin is that various countries with government-run medical systems have life expectancies that are as long as ours, or longer. That is very clever as media spin, if you don't bother to stop and think about it.

Author Sally Pipes did bother to stop and think about it in her book, "The Truth About ObamaCare." She points out that medical care is just one of the factors in life expectancy.

She cites a study by Professors Ohsfeldt and Schneider at the University of Iowa, which shows that, if you leave out people who are victims of homicide or who die in automobile accidents, Americans live longer than people in any other Western country.

Doctors do not prevent homicides or car crashes. In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world.

Americans get the latest pharmaceutical drugs, sometimes years before those drugs are available to people in Britain or in other countries where the government runs the medical system. Why? Because the latest drugs cost more and it is cheaper to let people die.

The media have often said that we have higher infant mortality rates than other countries with government medical care systems. But we count every baby that dies and other countries do not. If the media don't tell you that, so much the better for ObamaCare.

The mobster walks into an office. "Mighty nice insurance company you have here," he muses. "Be a shame if anything happened to it." Shortly thereafter the business owner "voluntarily" hands over a payment for "protection."

The Obama administration didn't quite pull a page from the Sopranos last week -- but it came awfully close.

Faced with the fact that the new health-care law was driving up insurance premiums, Health and Human Service Secretary Kathleen Sebelius warned that the administration would have "zero tolerance" for anyone who blamed them for those price hikes.

Insurance companies that persist in telling the truth could face dire consequences. "We will not stand idly by as insurers blame their premium hikes . . . on the requirement that they provide consumers with basic protections," she wrote in a letter to the insurance industries' trade association.

At the very least, she noted "bad actors" could be excluded from new government-run health-insurance exchanges that will begin operation in 2014 under the law. That could cost insurers as many as 30 million customers nationwide. People also might not be able to use government subsidies to buy insurance from companies that don't toe the administration line. What's next? Only companies that write checks to the Democratic National Committee can participate? Have too many employees contribute to the wrong candidate, and you get a visit from the insurance commissioner?

Well, at the risk of sleeping with the fishes, let's be clear about what ObamaCare means for insurance costs. The new health-care law requires insurers to provide coverage even for people who are already sick and forbids them from charging sick people higher premiums than healthy people. It requires all insurance plans to include a host of added benefits and prohibits insurers from capping how much they pay out over a year or a lifetime.

One can argue about whether or not these new rules are good things or the best way to deal with such issues as preexisting conditions. But one can't argue with the fact that insurers aren't going to do these things for free. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you're going to require insurers to cover more expensive customers and provide more benefits, it's going to cost more.

Making matters worse, ObamaCare utterly fails to control rising health-care costs. In fact, a new report from the government's own actuaries concludes that total US health-care spending will rise faster as a result of the new law than if we had done nothing.

The result is that insurance premiums will jump as much as 9 percent next year, especially in the individual and small-group markets. Some customers could see hikes of 20 percent or more.

It's not like the Obama administration couldn't see this coming. New York implemented many of the same insurance rules in 1983. The next year, premiums rose by nearly $500 per policy, resulting in nearly 500,000 New Yorkers dropping their insurance.

Massachusetts under RomneyCare, which is nearly identical to the new national law, has seen its premiums rising at nearly double the national average. The state has resorted to price controls, leading insurers to threaten to leave the state or stop writing policies.

Shortly before ObamaCare passed, the Congressional Budget Office warned that insurance premiums overall would nearly double in the next six to 10 years after passage of ObamaCare, roughly the same increase as if we hadn't passed health-care reform. But those who buy health insurance on their own, rather than receiving it at work, could see premiums rise 13 percent faster as a result of the new law. Other studies, including those by the Rand Corporation, suggested that younger and healthier workers could see even bigger premium hikes.

Now those warnings are coming true. And the Obama administration wants to punish anyone who points it out.

Of course, the insurance companies have only themselves to blame. In pursuit of those subsidies and a mandate that every American would have buy their products, they were only too happy to get in bed with big government.

But for the rest of us, the administration's insurance-protection racket provides an important lesson. As Gerald Ford once warned, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."

- Allow small businesses to take a tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their income

- Require congressional approval for any new federal regulation that would add to the deficit

- Roll back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels before TARP and stimulus (will save $100 billion in first year alone)

The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.

One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.

Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.

If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.

Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."

But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

President Barak Obama's second address to the United Nations General Assembly almost sounded as if he were speaking to voters on the campaign trail in Iowa, instead of fawning diplomats in Manhattan. He mentioned his financial reform, his commitment to fighting global warming, his efforts to withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his new nuclear treaty with Russia. In classic Obama form he mentioned the words "I," "me," or "my" 34 times, including this line about his efforts to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program: "Now let me be clear once more: The United States and the international community seek a resolution to our differences with Iran, and the door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to walk through it." As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech just hours later would show, President Obama is gonna be waiting a long time.

After kicking off with some brief remarks on the "failure" of "the system of Capitalism," Ahmadinejad then turned to 9/11 which he said "has affected the whole world for almost a decade." Ahmadinejad identified "those responsible for the attack" as "some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view." At that point, to their credit, President Obama's U.N. delegation had the decency to walkout. But the Obama administration then turned right around and affirmed their engagement Strategy: "We didn't offer engagement with Iran because we agree with what Ahmadinejad says," said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "We have offered engagement with Iran because we think it's in our national security interest."

But now even some former Obama administration officials are beginning to doubt their faith in Obama's foreign policy vision. This past Sunday, former Obama State Department Official Ray Takeyh wrote in The Washington Post: "The essence of Washington's approach is that confronted with a choice of debilitating isolation or rejoining the community of nations, Iran will eventually make the "right" decision. The Islamic Republic, however, is too wedded to its ideological verities and too subsumed by its rivalries to engage in such judicious determinations."

But the failure of President Obama's nuclear disarmament strategy is not limited to Tehran. Heritage Foundation analyst Theodore Bromund explains:

The underlying assumption of the President's statement is that the General Assembly in particular, and the United Nations in general, plays a central role in arms control and disarmament. This is not true. The Security Council has an important, but qualified and limited, role to play in pursuit of international peace and security.

The United Nations as a whole, as Heritage Foundation analyst Baker Spring points out, is profoundly handicapped by its assumption of moral equivalence between democracies and dictatorships, by its refusal to fully acknowledge the inherent right of self-defense, by its insistence on negotiating unverifiable and unenforceable treaties, and by its desire to supplant the authority of sovereign nation states with that of U.N. bureaucrats and unaccountable NGOs.

President Obama's devotion to international institutions like the United Nations is the core of the Obama Doctrine. But as Bromund alludes to above, the President's failure to acknowledge both the limitations and shortcomings of the U.N. allows other countries to abuse his goodwill for their own purposes. The U.N. finds no moral conflict in having human rights abusers sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council; in having socialist countries sit on the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council; or having terrorism-sponsoring nations block the U.N. from defining an act of terrorism.

President Obama did throw one sentence towards making "this institution more accountable," but no specific agenda was broached or referenced. Which is not surprising since Obama has failed to even nominate a U.S. Representative for Management and Reform to the United Nations. The President did call on other countries to "bring specific commitments to promote transparency; to fight corruption." But if the U.S. administration isn't willing to fight for those reforms in the U.N., what are the odds that other governments will be willing to offer them up for their own countries? We're not holding our breath.

I write this letter as a patriot, a taxpayer, a lifelong resident and as concerned citizen of what I consider to be the greatest nation ever known to man, the United States of America.

I am Caucasian, so let's get the racial aspect out of the way to start with. This letter has nothing to do with your race. I lived through the cruelty of Jim Crow and segregation and learned early on in my life that the color of my skin does not make me better or worse than any other man.

We all remember Martin Luther King, Jr.'s statement about judging people, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, and I believe that with all my heart.

I believe that America is an exceptional country. We have been liberator, benefactor and leader of the free world for centuries. America is an example of what can be achieved by free people living under the free enterprise system.

We have led the world in technology, industry, science and medicine for a long time.

Our capitalist system guarantees that those who explore new worlds and bring us new products and better techniques are amply rewarded for their efforts, and this is as it should be.

A person who is the first one to get there and the last one to leave, who burns the midnight oil and never gives up until they realize their goals, are a boon to humankind. They're the ones who discover new cures, start new industries and create jobs.

These people deserve to be rewarded for their hard work and for the products and services they bring to make life better for all mankind.

Mr. President, it is my personal opinion that you want to take the well-earned rewards of these people and give it to those who have done nothing to deserve them.

It's really redistribution of wealth, and it's nothing new. It's been tried many places before and it has miserably failed in every one of them.

Am I calling you a socialist? Yes, I am. I firmly believe that you are a socialist and a globalist, and that you think America should have a comeuppance and have our playing field leveled to match those of other countries not as industrious or as innovative as we are.

Mr. President, how can you support the building of a mosque in the very same area where Islamic radicals murdered so many Americans?

Am I accusing you of being a Muslim? No I'm not, but the jury is still out a little bit on that subject in my mind, because many times your sympathies seem to lean in that direction. You need to watch who you bow to Mr. President.

You have betrayed a whole generation of African-Americans who voted for you because they really believed all that junk about "hope and change," they really thought you were going to do something great and the only thing you've done is to make their jobs disappear and their health insurance go up.

You and your party have corrupted duly elected officials in an effort to get your legislative agenda passed. Remember the "Louisiana Purchase" and the "Cornhusker Kickback," and that's just a couple we know about, but you bought off a bunch of congressmen and senators, knowing that you were going against the will of the majority of Americans, because you think that you and your arrogant friends know more about what's good for America than the citizens your disastrous actions effect.

I don't believe you take the Islamic threat to America nearly as seriously as you should. You use semantics like "Overseas Contingency Operation" and "Man Caused Disasters" to soften your rhetoric toward people who would like nothing better than decapitate the entire population of America.

And Mr. President, if you'd really like to know the kind of warriors who are fighting the "Overseas Contingency Operation," and you would like to really know about what kind of enemies they're fighting, you should read a book called Lone Survivor by a brave, young Navy Seal named Marcus Lutrell who went to hell and back for his country, and is still a dedicated patriot. I think you'd find it enlightening, Mr. President and after you finish it would you pass it on to Janet Napolitano? And by the way, tell her that my invitation to take her to Iraq and show her some "Man Caused Disasters" is still open.

You seem to think that America has an endless supply of tax dollars for you to waste and give away, and the debt you've piled up could well bankrupt the greatest nation on earth.

Am I calling you a failure, Mr. President? With all due respect that's exactly what I'm doing.

For too long, conservatives have allowed the left to define them. With more Americans becoming disillusioned with Obama, it's time to counter the media's portrayal of conservatives as radical, illegitimate extremists, concerned only with amassing wealth and kicking gays. Here's a quick guide to help identify the basic differences between leftists and conservatives.

Conservatives understand that the system of capitalism is the greatest engine of wealth creation the world has ever known. They don't think profit is a dirty word. Leftists argue that feelings, not the bottom line, should be the motivating factor in all of life's decisions.

Conservatives believe that a man's fate is determined by the life choices he makes. Leftists believe if they're not successful, its because racist capitalists are hogging all the wealth. And that's not fair!

Conservatives know that life isn't fair and never will be. Leftists think that it should be, and that if you vote for them, they can legislate fairness. After they redefine it.

Conservatives know that throwing money at a problem usually ends up making the problem worse. Leftists believe that money can solve any problem. Preferably someone else's money.

Conservatives believe Thomas Sowell's assertion that there are no solutions - there are only trade-offs. Leftists believe that there are still free lunches, that rights trump responsibilities, and victims are more `valid' than producers. And if you don't agree, you're just a big ol' meanie.

Conservatives applaud merit. Leftists applaud intentions. Conservatives believe words have meanings. Leftists believe they have the right to redefine whatever words they care to.

Leftists believe if a theory looks good on paper, it will work. Conservatives understand that reality doesn't work that way, except in ivory towers.

Conservatives know that, these days, government is the problem. Leftists believe more government is the solution. And they will willingly create and/or exacerbate a crisis in order to prove it.

Conservatives believe in accountability, that actions speak louder than words. Leftists have succumbed to the herd mentality that sanctions bad behavior as long as it is done in the name of whichever leftist policy is most popular, be it global warming or the belief that everything bad that happens to the Obama administration is George Bush's fault.

Conservatives believe in individual rights, not group rights. They know that leftist words like 'social justice,' diversity', and multiculturalism, whose meanings are purely subjective, are used to divide, instill guilt, and put conservatives in the impossible position of having to spend their lives proving a negative.

Most conservatives believe in the rule of God. Leftists prefer the rule of man. As long as they are the man.

Leftists believe that life is a zero sum game. If someone wins, that means that someone has lost. They believe there are only so many pieces of the pie and the more pie someone has means someone out there has less. Conservatives know that this is just not so.

Conservatives are more inclined to do what they feel is right, even when no-one is looking. Leftists prefer to have their compassion recorded, preferably by TV cameras.

Leftists actually believe that world peace is possible. And the only thing standing in the way are those darn conservatives who have earned more money than they have a right to. Conservatives meanwhile, know that the utopia the left envisions is neither realistic nor possible. Thus they focus their efforts on more attainable goals, like making a living, raising their families and contributing to their communities.

Conservatives know that, no matter how thin the pancake, there are always two sides. Leftists have been taught that their side is the only legitimate side and any other point of view is invalid because it is motivated solely by hate, racism, homophobia, or greed. End of story.

It is very easy to concentrate on what divides us instead of the many more things that unite us, as this author is doing. But neither leftists or conservatives can refute the fact that we are all Americans. And I choose to believe that all of us want what we think is best for our country. We just disagree on the way to achieve it.

I'm planning to move my family and extended family into Mexico for my health, and I would like to ask you to assist me. We're planning to simply walk across the border from the U.S. Into Mexico, and we'll need your help to make a few arrangements. We plan to skip all the legal stuff like visas, passports, immigration quotas and laws. I'm sure they handle those things the same way you do here. So, would you mind telling your buddy, President Calderon, that I'm on my way over?

2. English-speaking government bureaucrats for all services I might need, whether I use them or not.

4. I want my grand kids to be taught Spanish by English-speaking (bi-lingual) teachers.

5. Tell their schools they need to include classes on American culture and history.

6. I want my grandkids to see the American flag on one of the flag poles at their school.

8. I will need a local Mexican driver's license so I can get easy access to government services.

9. I do plan to get a car and drive in Mexico , but, I don't plan to purchase car insurance, and I probably won't make any special effort to learn local traffic laws.

10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memo from their president to leave me alone, please be sure that every patrol car has at least one English-speaking officer.

11. I plan to fly the U.S. Flag from my house top, put U S. Flag decals on my car, and have a gigantic celebration on July 4th. I do not want any complaints or negative comments from the locals and they should not go to school that day wearing anything with the Mexican flag.

12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, or have any labor or tax laws enforced on any business I may start.

13. Please have the president tell all the Mexican people to be extremely nice and never say critical things about me or my family, or about the strain we might place on their economy.

16. I'll need Income tax credits so although I don't pay Mexican Taxes, I'll receive money from the government.

17. Please arrange it so that the Mexican Gov't pays $4,500 to help me buy a new car.

18. Oh yes, I almost forgot, please enroll me free into the Mexican Social Security program so that I'll get a monthly income in retirement.

I know this is an easy request because you already do all these things for all his people who walk over to the U.S. from Mexico . I am sure that President Calderon won't mind returning the favor if you ask him nicely.

Tell him I plan to run against him in the next presidential election and I was really born in Mexico. Trust me, no need to see my birth certificate.

I met a fairy today that would grant me one wish. "I want to live forever," I said.

"Sorry," said the fairy, "I'm not allowed to grant wishes like that!"

"Fine," I said, "I want to die after the Democrats pull their heads out of their asses!"

"You crafty bastard," said the fairy.

As Glenn mentioned on his Fox show this evening, new government regulatory crackdowns on certain foods and beverages across the country are forcibly shaping new dietary habits for many Americans. To make things easier, we thought we'd consolidate and break down a number of the bureaucratic overreaches for you.

How is government working to limit your scrumptious individual liberties? Let us count some of the ways.

• As we've reported, officials in Boston, Mass., are contemplating a ban on "sugary" beverages from the vending machines of all city municipal buildings in an attempt to whittle down public employees' waistlines.

• Likewise, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom used his executive order power to ban sodas and other sugary beverages from public building vending machines, replacing them with diet drinks and soy milk products.

• In a separate executive order, the San Francisco Mayor also single-handedly banned the use of city funds to purchase bottled water. "[Bottled water manufacturers] are making huge amounts of money selling God's natural resources. Sorry, we're not going to be part of it," he said.

• In New York, a Brooklyn Democrat introduced a bill in the state legislature earlier this year to ban the use of salt in restaurant cooking.

• The New York Times dubbed the state of California a "national trendsetter in all matters edible" when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill in July to ban trans fats from the state's 88,000 restaurants. "Under the new law, trans fats, long linked to health problems, must be excised from restaurant products beginning in 2010, and from all retail baked goods by 2011." Other places that have banned trans fats include New York City, Philadelphia, Stamford, Conn., and Montgomery County, Md. - a suburb of Washington, D.C.

• In perhaps one of the most outrageous cases of regulations restricting small business, health officials in Oregon shut down 7-year-old Julie Murphy's roadside lemonade stand in August for failing to secure a $120 "temporary restaurant" license.

• Kids may also be also be getting the shaft in San Francisco where officials are launching a campaign to ban "Happy Meals" or any other meals that come with a toy. The so-called "Healthy Meals Incentive" would ban toys if the food contains too much fat, sugar or salt. It wouldn't be the first time meal-time toys would be nixed in California; earlier this year, Santa Clara County approved an ordinance "to break the link between unhealthy food and prizes."

• New York City has banned school bake sale as part of a new wellness policy that also limits options in vending machines and student-run stores. Proceeds from the ventures generally used to help help finance school-related activities like pep rallies and proms.

• Under state laws in Texas, a single piece of candy landed a 10-year-old Brazos Elementary School student in detention for a week in May.

• In May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent this letter to General Mills, warning that the company's claims about Cheerios helping to lower cholesterol represent "serious violations" of federal law.

• And in the news today, the state of Florida may become the first in the country to ban chocolate milk from public school cafeterias. The Florida Board of Education voted Tuesday to remove all sugary drinks in schools, including soda and flavored milk. The board is considering allowing only three types of drinks for younger children-water, unsweetened juice and plain, low-fat milk. High school students would be allowed diet sodas and other low-calorie drinks.

Let me add that, this is just the beginning. Allow government control of healthcare, and they can pretty much regulate us to do anything they want. Now, you may say, “These things are better for us” and I would have to agree.” Early on, Hitler got the youth of his country to go to Sunday physical fitness camps, and this exercise was good for their bodies. At the same time, he used the opportunity to poison their minds.

Prompting squawks of derision from liberal commentators and reporters, the Texas State Board of Education is about to debate a resolution submitted by social conservative members calling for the rejection of social studies textbooks that favor Islam over Christianity.

The resolution cites examples of bias in textbooks currently in use across the nation and also texts used in Texas schools as recently as 2003. It demands that the Texas "SBOE will look to reject future prejudicialsocial studies submissions that continue to offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world's major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage space-wise and/or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over others."

The resolution, scheduled for consideration at the SBOE meeting Friday, was proposed by Texas businessman Randy Rives, a conservative and a former candidate for a seat on the elected education board. The resolution includes four single-spaced pages of appendices presenting evidence of its allegations.

"We're just trying to protect the school children of Texas," Rives told WND. "We have documented that in the past there was some pro-Islamic and anti-Christian literature in some of ourtextbooks. We want to put textbook companies on notice that if this happens again, it can cause your textbooks to be rejected."

"We are the largest buyer of textbooks in the United States, and publishers like to try to get others states to accept the same version [we use]. What we do in Texas influences the rest of the nation and we need to take that seriously, and make sure an agenda isn't pushed through thetextbooks."

Rives conducted a study of texts approved by the SBOE for use in Texas in 2002 and 2003, and found numerous instances of bias. For example:

• Two texts devoting twice or nearly twice as much space to Muslim "beliefs, practices and holy writings" as to Christian beliefs.

• A text "dwelling on" a Christian massacre of Muslims, but "censoring" Muslim massacres of Christians during the Crusades.

• A text "claiming Islam 'brought untold wealth to thousands and a better life to millions,' while 'because of [Christian] religious zeal . many peoples died and many civilizations were destroyed."

The resolution also cites texts currently in use in American classrooms and finds the same problems:

• "Patterns of pejoratives toward Christians and superlatives toward Muslims, calling Crusaders aggressors, 'violent attackers' or 'invaders' while euphemizing Muslim conquest of Christian lands as 'migrations' by 'empire builders.'"

• "Politically-correct whitewashes of Islamic culture . and indicting Christianity for the same practices they . minimize, sugarcoat or censor in Islam."

• "Sanitized definitions of 'jihad' that exclude religious intolerance or military aggression against non-Muslims."

Rives told Alana Goodman of the Alexandria, Va.-based Culture and Media Institute, "In the social studies books we need to make sure that our democratic values are depicted and that's not just my opinion, that's what the Texas education code says."

Much to the dismay of the Dallas Morning News, the resolution also warns that "more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly, as they are now doing."

DMN's Terrence Stutz reported that the resolution "offered no specific evidence of such investments." Stutz apparently did not bother to read Appendix III of the resolution, which cites a European press report that the Dubai royal family "was becoming 'a major shareholder' in theEducation Media and Publishing Group."

EMPG, according to the resolution, "controls Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep and Harcourt Education, two of the most successful and established educational book publishers in the United States, together forming the largest player in the K-12 publishing segment."

As WND previously reported, American public school textbooks have been used to promote Islam, and publishing company executives are primarily responsible for the content of the texts.

DMN columnist Jacquielynn Floyd ranted, "Like a movie monster that won't stay dead, the crazy-eyed 'social conservative' faction of our ever-entertaining State Board of Education has caught us all off-guard once more, lurching back onto center stage amid a flurry of pitchforks and flaming torches."

Reporter Stutz failed to interview Randy Rives for his story, but he did speak with Kathy Miller of the Texas Freedom Network, which he describes as "a religious freedom group that has battled withsocial conservatives."

Miller accused board members of "putting politics ahead of just educating our kids," and, according to Stutz, argued that "current textbooks offer a balanced treatment of the world's religions."

On its website, Texas Freedom Network is calling the resolution "anti-Islam," dismisses the resolution as "superficial and grossly misleading" and attempts to refute it. But it is TFN's rebuttal that appears to be misleading.

For example, TFN's first point asserts that Rives' claim of double the coverage for Islamic beliefs is incorrect, because Rives ignores lengthy discussions of the Christian church in history and Christian influence on politics, art and culture. Rives, however, specifies "beliefs, practices and holy writings" - in short, theology - not history and politics.

TFN's second point also misses the mark. The resolution criticizes a Prentice textbook for ignoring atrocities committed by the Muslim conqueror Tamerlane. TFN responds thattextbooks by Glencoe and McDougal do mention Tamerlane's depredations - but the resolution wasn't addressing those texts.

Nevertheless, Lauri Lebo of the liberal site Religious Dispatches praises TFN's study as a "great critique."

Lebo concludes that, "Based on TFN's analysis, it appears board members, in putting together the resolution, simply glanced at the textbooks they're criticizing, rather than actually reading and comprehending the texts."

Radio talk-show host Bill Press is the tiniest of fish in the radio ocean, but this minnow's all over the place complaining about the whales. The problem is, of course, that if the market is any kind of measurement, no one knows, or cares, that he's written a book. So he's written a column to self-tout "Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America's Airwaves."

Press writes about the good ol' days of civil discourse, but "that's not what we hear nonstop today." And who's to blame? "Honest disagreement on the issues has been replaced by a barrage of ugly name-calling from today's ministers of hate on the right."

OK, then let's see the evidence. But first, let's dispense with the Michael Savage examples, shall we? Press cites this phony as screaming to a gay activist, "You should get AIDS and die, you pig!" That is true, but Press doesn't tell you that a) that was not on his radio show; it was on MSNBC, and b) Savage was loudly condemned by conservatives (like yours truly), and MSNBC was congratulated when he was fired, though some of us also pointed out that MSNBC should never have hired this bigot in the first place. That example is evidence Press is doing a clip job, not a research project.

Besides, it's Limbaugh that Press is after. He bestows on Rush the title of "Hate Monger Number One." Why? Horrors. Rush called Elena Kagan a "socialist," a woman being rushed to confirmation "before her radicalism is understood by the public." Rush also said Obama is "plotting to overthrow core American values." I'm not kidding. Those are Press's examples.

What other "toxic" proof does he have? Sean Hannity asked about Obama: "Is there anything that he likes about this country?" Dear Bill: this might seem more outrageous if Obama wasn't skipping the traditional Memorial Day observance at Arlington Cemetery so he can be in Chicago.

Press said Mark Levin attacked Sonia Sotomayor as a "radical leftist" and a "bigot." Again, if Sotomayor had not said "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences" could judge better than white guys, maybe she wouldn't stand accused of bigotry.

Glenn Beck said Obama is "trying to destroy the country" and is "pushing America toward civil war." He warned Christians to leave their churches if they hear the words "social justice." Honey, hide the kids!

But wait. It's about to get better. He also writes in his column: "You never hear those kinds of ugly comments from progressive talkers Ed Schultz, Stephanie Miller, or Thom Hartmann, if you can find them on your radio dial at all."

Who said this: "You're damn right, Dick Cheney's heart's a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him. I'm glad he didn't tip over. He is the new poster child for health care in this country."

Who said this: "How can Evan Bayh sit there as an honest player for health care reform when his wife works for an [insurance] industry that is just absolutely butchering the American people?" The same host denounced Mrs. Joe Lieberman: "Does the word 'whore' apply? Are we there yet?"

Who said this: "You rat bastards are going to cause another Murrah Federal Building explosion, you are. And then...maybe at that point Beck will do the honorable thing and blow his brains out. Maybe at that point, Limbaugh will do the honorable thing and just gobble up enough Viagra that he becomes absolutely rigid and keels over dead. Maybe then O'Reilly will just drink a vat of the poison he spews out on America every night and choke to death." Even the Christian evangelist Franklin Graham recently made this host's please-kill-yourself list.

Who offered a Limbaugh song parody, with lyrics including these: "I'm a Nazi!...That's right! I really I am!...I'm a Nazi! That's right, you're being scammed! I'm a Nazi! I don't care about the middle class. I'm a big fat conservative butthead, with the face of a horse's ass."

And finally, who said this: "Taking a page right out of a Nazi playbook, [conservative] organizers bus in professional protestors and arm them with instructions on how to take over meetings, shut down discussion, shout over any pro-health care reform speakers, and then post video of the resulting chaos on YouTube. It's mob rule, pure and simple."

The answers are: Leftwing radio and MSNBC talk show host Ed Schultz offered the first two pearls. The third comes from the especially vicious left-wing radio host Mike Malloy. The fourth attack, words and music, comes from Randi Rhodes, the former Air America darling.

And the fifth should be familiar to Bill Press -- since it came from Bill Press.

In a recent article by Robert Schmul on AOL Politics, he has hit conservatives below the belt in a way that he hopes will stick. If you can't get the American population to get behind your socialist President, then just try to paint the conservative leaders as suspiciously similar to him.

He claims that Sarah Palin is a lot like Barack Obama. He points to similarities that are encapsulated at sarahpalinblog.com.

• Both emerged quickly on the national scene and used their charisma to become media-magnified political celebrities.

• Both followed up their initial national exposure with well-publicized books.

• Both became nationally recognized as Washington outsiders with limited governmental experience.

• Both share somewhat exotic backgrounds far removed from the continental United States.

• Both have positioned themselves in opposition to the existing establishments.

• Both created followers who are closely connected and willing to work on behalf of emerging and engaging personalities.

Obama is a socialist, Sarah Palin is a capitalist. That is basic and definitive, and makes any comparison rhetorical. Those observations are no more relevant than their sharing a preference in breakfast cereal.

Obama is the most pro-abortion president in history. Abortion is an act that places self-interest first. Sarah Palin gave birth, at a most inconvenient time, to a beautiful little boy who has Down Syndrome. That is an act of selflessness, compassion, and love.

Obama holds a European socialist view that America should apologize to the world for being a super power for so long. Sarah thinks America is still Reagan's "shining city on the hill" and should continue to lead the world into a bright future for all who understand the precious concept of freedom and individual liberty.

Obama looks most comfortable at a U.N. meeting with all his like minded friends who long for one-world government. Sarah looks most comfortable at home, making moose stew dinner for her family after a good hunt.

Obama leaves God out of the Christmas address, the Thanksgiving address, the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and the Jewish Proclamation, all while arrogantly asking him to bless our Nation.

Sarah takes a prayer team with her to hold her accountable everywhere she goes. She literally doesn't make a political move without joining her prayer team and asking for direction from God-not one.

Obama depends on a teleprompter, because he wants to be sure his words are packaged and perfect. Sarah Palin wrote on her hand, because that's what chicks do, and she is real.

Here is an observation Mr. Schmul: While Republican candidates clamor for the Palin endorsement in primaries, it is difficult to find a Democrat who wants to even be seen campaigning with Obama.

No one knows if Sarah will ever run for office again. She is a private citizen who is one of the most effective voices speaking for the American people today. She does not even need an office to do that. Obama is elected, running, and so out of touch with America that he still clings to notion that the only reason for the unpopularity of his health care plan is that Americans just don't get it.

Using Robert Schmul's approach, one could find "commonalities" between Hitler and Mother Teresa, but the reality is there is no comparison when it comes to their hearts, their goals, and their legacy-the things that really count.

I think the MSM will continue to attempt to cast erroneous aspersions upon Sarah Palin and other conservatives, such as comparing them to Barack Obama, in an effort to dismay Sarah's base, and frighten conservatives. There are only two problems with that:

You may remember about this time last year the White House declared war on Fox News, saying that we were irresponsible in our reporting and biased against the administration.

I write about that extensively in my new book "Pinheads and Patriots" because it actually helped us. Our ratings went up, and the credibility of the administration went down.

After a few weeks of that nonsense, a truce was declared and business went on as usual.

Now that war is being resurrected. Not by the president but by some of his acolytes.

With the November election looming, the Democrats really are in a tough spot. The economy is not getting much better, and voters are angry.

All the polls say the Democrats are in trouble. So a smokescreen is needed to mask reality, something to drive attention away from the economy and other problems.

A few weeks ago, the president went after Congressman John Boehner. That didn't go anywhere. So now some lefties are bringing Fox News back into the war zone.

If you visit the left-wing websites, the rhetoric is pretty much all the same: Fox News lies; Fox News is a propaganda arm of the Republican Party; Fox News doesn't give President Obama a chance.

REP. ALAN GRAYSON, D-FLA.: One of the fundamental problems is Fox, OK? Fox has turned into Monty Python's lying circus. All day long they spew lies out time after time, day after day. And they have created this bubble of irreality around the people who listen to them, and it's a threat to this country.

FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Things have gone downhill, I think, in the last few years with the polarization of our country, with the evolution of a new kind of politics, with the birth of Fox News that now distorts everything rather than tells the truth.

RICK SANCHEZ, HOST, CNN's "RICK'S LIST": And then there is Fox News, which is essentially the voice of the Republican Party, whose job it is to make this man look bad no matter what he does.

Since the war on Fox News failed the last time around, it is a bit perplexing that it would be resurrected. Americans can decide for themselves whether FNC is a propaganda mill. They don't need dishonest commentators to tell them that. We're here 24-7. You can see for yourself.

And the American people have. The CNN commentator you just heard gets beaten by "The Factor" about 7 to 1 in the ratings.

So blaming Fox News for the woes of the Democratic Party is another losing proposition. And like trying to demonize the Tea Party, it will backfire.

The troubling reality is that the USA is suffering economically and President Obama's leadership is being questioned. That's what's in play, and all the partisan bloviating in the world won't change that.

REP. JOHN BOEHNER, R-OHIO, HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: Republicans have discussed coming forward with our plans for the future. And over the course of the next three months we're going to continue to work with the American people, work with those who are interested in terms of developing what that is. We don't know what it's going to be, not at this point. But when we do, we'll make sure that you are aware of it.

BRET BAIER, HOST: That was the House Minority Leader John Boehner a few months ago. Now they know. And here it is. A 21-page document, called "A Pledge to America." It's being circulated at this hour to Republican lawmakers.

Here is part of the preamble, "Regarding the policies of the current government, the governed do not consent. An arrogant and out-of- touch government of self-appointed elites makes decisions, issues mandates, and enacts laws without accepting or requesting the input of many."

There are many specifics in this 21-page document. We went through them at the top of the show. You can read the write-up of the document on FoxNews.com.

But let's talk about it with the panel, Steve Hayes, senior writer for the Weekly Standard, Mort Kondracke, Executive Editor of Roll Call, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": I think the fact that it is specific and lengthy. You can almost say it's exhaustive in a way that I think is both bold and aggressive.

Look, I take a backseat to no one with my cynicism about these kinds of things. In a sense, it's a political gimmick and it will help Republicans get elected. I get that. So was the "Contract with America."

And if you look back at the "contract," even five or six years after the contract was passed, 95 of the programs that were either scrutinized or eliminated had increased in the budgets by a total of about 15 percent. So there are reasons to be skeptical and these are promises coming out of Washington.

Having said all of that, this is a pretty impressive document. It is specific about spending levels and turning back TARP, returning to pre-stimulus levels, repealing health care. There are a lot of specifics in here, and I think a lot of things for people to like.

BAIER: Mort, the plan will be rolled out tomorrow at a hardware store in suburban Virginia as the GOP leaders talk about the specifics. What about all of this?

MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, "ROLL CALL": Everybody wants to be with the folks, which is OK.

Look, the biggest thing that the document does not address is the fact that the national debt is now 100 percent of GDP and rising, right? So they start talking about how they are going to cut spending, $100 billion, in the first year out of a deficit that is now $1.5 trillion.

They are talking about cutting, freezing discretionary spending, discretionary spending represents 32 percent of the federal budget, 58 percent of the federal budget is mandatory. That's entitlement. That's Medicare, that's Social Security. Not a word, not a word about doing that.

Furthermore, they are going to extent all of the Bush tax cuts permanently. Now they do not deal with how they are going to fill the hole. If they say, well, we'll take in more revenue, you got to show it, because I don't think the math adds up.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Mort is dismayed that Republicans aren't suicidally promising the kind entitlements with a month to go before Election Day. I'm not surprised. Democrats who were in charge haven't proposed that either. All of it is punted into December on the deficit commission.

Look, if I were a Republican strategist, I probably wouldn't have issued any of this. If you are in an election where the other side brought the country ideologically to a point it does not want to go, against tremendous popular resistance on health care and others, I would allow the other guys to carry all that agenda into election and defend it and stand on the sidelines and say, you know, that will be quite enough.

However, if you decide you want a program like this, this I think is OK. It doesn't quite have the concision and the bite of Gingrich's idea of, what is it, 20 years ago. But I think it has enough specifics, cutting taxes for business, returning the unspent stimulus money to the Treasury, and particularly the repeal of Obamacare with the institution of really required, tort reform, the one element that is completely left out of the Democratic health reform, scandalously so.

So as it goes, I think it's fairly circumscribed. I don't think it will hurt a lot. But it does give the Democrats ammunition in a place where I wouldn't have given them any.

BAIER: "Repeal and replace healthcare," Steve, is what it says. This is on the sixth month anniversary, if you will, of when the president signed the health bill in law. The president going to the backyard in Fairfax, Virginia, to talk to some folks about health care reform.

Also purchasing health insurance across state lines, expend health savings accounts, ensure access for patients with preexisting conditions, something that's in the current law, and permanently setting up the Hyde amendment banning taxpayer funding for abortion. These are some of the specifics in the health care portion.

HAYES: Right. And behind the scenes I think there was a debate among the leadership in the House about how specific to be and whether to go beyond just talking about the jobs and the economy. Ultimately, as you say, there was a decision made to be broader and have a broad statement about a governing philosophy. And there is in the forward a discussion of returning to constitutional limits on government.

Just to pick up on what Mort said, though, I don't think it's necessary, as much as I would have liked it, I don't think it's necessary and/or wise to engage in a specific discussion about entitlements in this kind of a document.

That said, conservatives are the ones out making specific proposals on entitlement reform, like Mitch Daniels, like Paul Ryan.

HAYES: This is where the ideas are coming from. So I think you can't really say that the conservatives aren't the ones who are willing to take risks on entitlement reform just because it's not in this rather exhaustive document.

KONDRACKE: The Republican Party does not have the courage of Paul Ryan, let's face it. They are not willing to privatize Social Security or say they will. They are not willing to voucherize Medicare. They're not going to do it.

HAYES: But Barack Obama is sitting in the White House. He won't even talk about these things --

BAIER: I want to ask one question about 1994. Back then President Clinton went around the country saying the "Contract with America" was really a contract on America. It backfired, and America obviously had a wave election for Republicans. What Democrats are doing about this "Pledge to America," is there a danger there?

KONDRACKE: Well, I mean they are going to attack it obviously. You know, I don't think that -- I think this election is baked, frankly, and I don't think that anything that Obama says about health care or the Republicans say about what they are going to do is going to change it at all. This will be a wave election. The Republicans are going to score big victories because the unemployment rate is 9.6 and people are mad.

Interestingly enough, those who have no problem with Hispanics coming over the border often consider themselves to be environmentalists. Here is what Arizona’s Sonora desert looks like after all of this traffic:

Several of my posts are found at Flopping Aces, e.g., Political Chess: Well played, Mr. Boehner!

Maps of racial breakdown in major American cities; notice how segregated these cities are (most cities have had decades of Democrats in charge):

Who is really qualified to be governor of New York? Note, in most media, only the qualifications of the Republican seem to be called into question:

President Obama has caused irreparable harm to the gulf coast economy (it is a coincidence that these states did not support Obama in the election?)

Representative Loretta Sanchez accusing her immigrant opponent of being anti-immigrant and anti-Latino:

RUSH: The Republican ruling class in the Senate doesn't get it yet, either. Jim DeMint is fit to be tied. He says, "It was bad enough to watch my colleagues work to support Lisa Murkowski in the primary after she had built a record of betraying conservative principles, but watching them back her after she left the party and launched a campaign against the Republican nominee was more than I could bear."

DeMint is also not happy with the fact that the Republican establishment in the Senate is leaving her in charge of her committees until the elections, until she is officially gone. "South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint is publicly criticizing his Senate GOP colleagues for allowing Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to keep her ranking membership on a key committee less than a week after she announced a write-in campaign to try to retain her seat. In a revealing e-mail to his supporters, DeMint gives his account of Wednesday's private Senate GOP caucus meeting, when he believed his colleagues would vote to strip Murkowski of her post on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee -- but the caucus instead allowed her to keep her remain [sic] in the coveted role.

"'It was bad enough to watch my colleagues work to support her in the primary after she had built a record of betraying conservatives principles,' writes DeMint. 'But watching them back her after she left the party and launched a campaign against the Republican nominee was more than I could bear.'" Now, she's a RINO, and the ruling class Republicans in the Senate still haven't gotten the message -- and they never will get the message. The ruling class is never, ever gonna get the message no matter what party they happen to be a member of. A RINO is a RINO, and a RINO is gonna stay loyal to a RINO no matter what. As far as I'm concerned, the country cannot continue and allow the ruling class to skim our money off the top for themselves, which is among many other things what they do.

If these people, if the Republicans in the Senate are not careful -- and all these other RINOs, if they're not careful -- they are going to spawn a third party, and they're gonna end up being the third party. They are gonna end up being the minority third party. If they continue to pretend that they don't know what's going on and if they continue to pretend that we don't know what's going behind their closed doors. Now, I think there are enough principled people in Washington to make life difficult for liberals in both parties. This country isn't just a little bankrupt, folks. We aren't just a little overtaxed. A little bit of a public option will bring down the entire private sector health care system. We don't need RINOs cutting deals with Imam Obama.

The ruling class, they either know what's going on and they're steadfastly immune to it, opposing it, or just arrogantly ignoring it, or they really do have no idea what's going on in the country. They have no idea of the staying power of the Tea Party movement. And if they don't they're going to learn the hard way, and that's their business. Lisa Murkowski lost, and it's obvious that ruling class Republicans are unhappy about it. We got Obama and Biden calling Mike Castle to commiserate with him. Now he's thinking running as a third party. And for all I know, he's being encouraged to do this by Obama. He's being encouraged to do this by Harry Reid. I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if in these closed-door phone calls this is what they're encouraging Mike Castle to do.

Actually the RINOs have gotten the message; they just don't like it. They are as resentful of it as the Democrats are, and DeMint "vowed yesterday..." This is from the AP: "Sen. Jim DeMint vowed Thursday to stop Lisa Murkowski's write-in candidacy 'dead in its tracks' as he expressed outrage at the GOP's refusal to strip the senator of her leadership role on the energy committee. The South Carolina Republican supports Joe Miller, a conservative political upstart who upset Murkowski in last month's GOP primary" in Alaska. "DeMint said he believed Wednesday's meeting of GOP senators was to choose a replacement for Murkowski, the ranking member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"But 'one senator after another stood up to argue in favor of protecting her place on the committee,' he said -- resulting in an outcome he said she'll undoubtedly use in her campaign against Miller," which he's no doubt right about. Murkowski in her write-in campaign is gonna go out there in Alaska and say that the Republican establishment in the Senate wanted her to stay there -- and that's not gonna help her. Not in Alaska. It's not going to help her. This is where you... (sigh) I don't know. Will he name names of the people sit on the committee? Maybe he will at some point. Now, here's Murkowski.

This is in The Hill: "Republican senators opted not to oust Sen. Lisa Murkowski from a top committee post because they believe she has a shot at winning reelection..." That's why they kept her in there. They think she has a chance to win this. "Murkowski said Republican senators "'recognize, "You know what? Lisa might be a risk-taker, but she's got a real shot at coming back here, and it only makes good sense that we would not want to be so punitive that she would be discouraged by the actions of her colleagues,"' she said in a Q-and-A with Time magazine published [today]." GOP Senators think I have a shot at winning election as a write-in. So the out-of-touch bunch continues to revel in their out-of-touchness.

RUSH: I'm sure DeMint has the names of the Republicans that voted for Murkowski. If he wants to release them, he will. Maybe we'll find out. By the way, you ought to know this. The polling in Alaska does not favor Lisa Murkowski, and this is from TIME Magazine. The poll shows that Miller, the winner on the Republican side, has a big lead over Murkowski, and here's a quote from it: "The poll suggests that Murkowski may be splitting the independent and Democratic vote with McAdams, while the tea party and Sarah Palin-backed Miller has consolidated support among conservatives." This is exactly what I said. If this holds true, Lisa Murkowski is gonna split the Democrat vote. She's gonna become representative of a minority third party. She is a bellwether.

If Republican establishment types are not careful -- if this holds out, if the polling data is accurate and, if by the time we get to November, Miller wins big because he consolidated conservatives -- Murkowski and McAdams split the independent and Democrat vote. That's a harbinger of things to come for Republicans down the line. They are not going to split -- a RINO Republican is not gonna split -- the conservative vote with a conservative Tea Party-type nominee. It ain't going to happen, and if they're not careful, the Republicans are going to end up as a minority third party. They might actually -- if this holds up, the RINOs, Murkowski and her bunch might actually -- end up proving to be of use to conservatives after all. Well, I mean if Murkowski's gonna run on a write-in candidate or ballot, and she splits the vote with the Democrat and the independent and Miller wins big, then of course a RINO Republican proves useful to our side.

RUSH: Boca Raton and Victor. Welcome to the EIB Network. It's great to have you here, sir.

CALLER: Great to talk to you again, Mr. Limbaugh. Mega dittos to you from true conservatives at the Free Republic.

CALLER: First, congratulations on your wedding, Mr. Limbaugh. I would have loved to have attended, but apparently my invitation got lost in the mail. (laughing)

CALLER: (laughing) Mr. Limbaugh, I would like to comment on the situation with Jim DeMint, and I cannot tell you how angry I am about what's going on.

CALLER: Obviously, it's an obligatory listening for everybody including the RINOs and the DINOs, and I want to send them a message that we will not get fooled again. We will not tolerate every one of these dinosaur RINOs.

CALLER: I call them DINO-RINOs. From Boehner to McConnell to Eric Cantor, every one of these people who is supporting Murkowski against a sterling candidate like Joe Miller --

RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. I don't know that Boehner and Eric Cantor are supporting Murkowski. They're in the House. Of course, Murkowski is of the Senate.

CALLER: Yeah but I just think there's still a little clique of these people who have learned nothing. When someone like Cantor can go outside and call himself a, whatever, young lion or new blood, the guy has been in the House for ten years and his reputation is very well known. But my main point is just I agree with you a hundred percent on this crazy situation about the third party. As much we talked about it -- and of course it's a losing proposition -- but ultimately they are the ones are gonna become extinct if they don't learn the lesson. And I'm really glad to hear you bring up this point because it really, really makes my blood boil at this point.

RUSH: El Segundo, California, Rahm. It's nice to have you on Open Line Friday. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hello, sir, from Southern California at the Southern Command. I congratulate you belatedly on a happy birthday, a clean bill of health --

CALLER: -- and going from An Army of One to An Army of Two with your recent wedding bells. And thank you for taking my call.

CALLER: I think Judith Miller is absolutely incorrect when she says the Republicans are destroying their party. It's actually the Democrats who are destroying their party and that are desperate for some power or some energy.

RUSH: What she actually said was that she thought Obama was doing something very smart at his town hall meeting. When the opposing party is destroying itself, you sorta get out of the way and let it happen. She did say she thinks that that's happening. You're right. The Republican Party is together, but it does have its challenges.

RUSH: There's a raging Tea Party movement that some elements of the Republican Party do not wish to embrace.

CALLER: And this Christine O'Donnell? I saw her on Hannity in the interview. She's a fantastic speaker -- to the point, doesn't mince words -- and if she defeats Coons, as I think she will, it will be a big blow to Krauthammer and Rove, and I thank you for taking my call once more. B'bye.

RUSH: You bet. I think she's got a good chance to win. You know, from the beginning when the establishment types said, "We need Castle 'cause we need 51 seats. We could really take back the Senate with 51 seats," well, the first thing that struck me about that is: You need 60 seats in the Senate all voting the same way to have a true legislative majority. 'Cause you need 60%, 60 voters for cloture to stop debate and go ahead and vote on any piece of legislation. 'Cause it's Senate rule. Fifty-one is not 60. And if you have a majority of 51 and four or five of them are Mike Castle, Susan Collins, John McCain, Olympia Snowes, you don't have a minority. You've still got a fractured Republican caucus in the Senate. But what you do have with 51 seats is your chairmanships. (Gasp!)

Yes, and that's what this was all about. Fifty-one seats gives you your chairmanships, and that's power. And then Christine O'Donnell wins, and I said, "Well, okay, how come the desire for 51 seats goes away? Why does that just fly out the window? Why not get behind Christine O'Donnell and get your 51st seat that way? Why does the 51st seat have to be Castle?" Did you ever ask yourself that question? "Why does the 51st seat have to be a RINO?" Okay, so she was down 25 points. Now she's down 16. She's gonna continue to make ground on this Coons guy. She's gonna get within the margin of error and she's going to have a chance to win this thing. Why not get behind her and try to make it a victory?

A lot of people look at the Republican Party as the repository of conservatism and that's what we're trying to make it, but it isn't yet. It's not that now. She can win. There's no question she can win. Look, I went on a little bit of a tirade yesterday when I started talking about the relative merits of Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell versus Obama. What are we really talking about here? We're at a genuine crossroads that we've never faced in this country in terms of the country's future and what kind of country we're going to have. And whether we're going to have a traditional America as founded, with American exceptionalism as the foundation, with what we all know the world is envious of -- endless opportunity, both economic, educational, and whatever. Freedom.

Or are we gonna wipe out the private sector and the aspects of America that make all those things possible? That's where we are. We face that. Now, if Mickey Mouse could get on the ballot and would vote against the Obama agenda, I would support Mickey Mouse. I don't know how else to explain where we are. This is not nuance time. I don't think it is. I don't think we have the time here to worry about nuance and whether we're electing somebody with the right kind of IQ, approved IQ or approved and sanctioned pedigree. What we need are people who are going to stop the Democrat-Obama agenda. Hell, if we could find a rat that could get elected, I'd support the rat, if it promised to vote against Obama and the Democrat agenda. What are we really talking about here? That's it to me.

RUSH: You know, speaking of Lisa Murkowski, where are the conservative pundits? Where are the Jonah Goldbergs, the Krauthammers, the Karl Roves and the Bill Kristols of the world? Where are they telling Lisa Murkowski to drop this write-in bid? Where is the pressure on Rick Lazio to drop out of the New York governor's race now that he's lost the primary? Can we get consistent here? Where is the pressure for these people to stop dividing the Republican Party after the voters have spoken? Hmm?

RUSH: Here's Roger in Alexandria, Louisiana. It's great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush! Rush, I have a little concern with this pattern of Republicans not accepting what the majority has voted on in the primaries and doing this write-in policy. It bothers me that it may become a larger problem, especially if one of them happens to get elected. And it's also causing a rift in our party. For example, DeMint ripping the Republicans for allowing Murkowski to keep her seat on certain committees.

CALLER: And I just wonder your thoughts, if you think this is just a couple of isolated cases, or could this turn into being a real big problem?

RUSH: I think it is a big problem. Right now it's both. It's just a couple of cases. But it illustrates the problem. It illustrates the ruling class mentality versus the un-cool class, the country class; and the ruling class exists in all political parties. Republican Party, Democrat Party. The Tea Party is persona non grata to a lot of Republicans. They don't want the Tea Party to win. They don't want the Tea Party to become dominant. It's no different -- you know, I told the story I don't know how many times of being ripped to shreds by Northeast liberal Republicans about Christians in the Republican Party. They thought it was my job to go talk to the Christians and get 'em to stop worrying about abortion because it was embarrassing the rest of these Northeastern Republicans. They didn't like going to conventions with these Southerners. They didn't like their friends on the liberal Democrat side making fun of them because who was in their party. So this is really nothing new. What's causing it to now be seen by all of us is the success of the Tea Party.

CALLER: I'll agree. And you notice only two people that have decided to do this are people that have held office for a long time and do not want to give it up.

RUSH: Exactly. And will do what they have to do to subvert their own party, in a way, to win.

RUSH: All right. Right now it's only these two, it's Murkowski and Castle, and we're not sure what Castle's going to do. He's just toying with the idea of third party. We do know that Obama and Biden called Mike Castle to commiserate with him, but I'll tell you this. One thing, Roger, to keep in mind: The polling data out in Alaska right now shows that Murkowski, as a write-in candidate, is not taking any votes from the Republican. Well, not enough to matter. The Republican nominee is the Tea Party guy, Joe Miller. The Democrat out there and the -- and the independent votes, that's the vote being split. Murkowski is essentially taking votes away from the Democrat candidate out there in the polling right now.

So the warning for the Republicans is that if this continues to happen and if it expands, the likelihood is that if there is a third party that results from this, the third party could end up being the current Republican Party. They could end up being the minority party in all of this if this is not contained. 'Cause I don't think the Democrats or the Republicans understand yet the full wave of energy and motion that is propelling the anti-ruling class, anti-Washington sentiment out there -- the Tea Party sentiment, if you will. I think the Democrats have a better idea of it than the Republicans do. I think Democrats... I mean, they can see these poll numbers. They can talk all they want about how they've got polls that show themselves not doing as bad, but they can see Obama at 42% CNN, and they can see their own states. They do local polls.

It was not that long ago that certain Democrat state organizations were asking this outfit in North Carolina, Public Policy Polling, not to report results of congressional and Senate races in the states 'cause they were so bad for incumbent Democrats. Now, it's early. It's still the middle of September here. The election's not until -- well, just a little over 40 days. It's never wise to count something as over, particularly in politics, long before it is. So the conventional wisdom is the Senate is still a long shot. About the Senate, let me just again say: Yeah, it would be great to have a majority in the Senate, but you really need 60 votes -- and, look, the Democrats had 60 and they still couldn't get all of what Obama wanted.

They had a supermajority in the House, they had 60 seats in the Senate 'til Scott Brown won, and they still were having trouble getting things done. It's not automatic. For the Republicans to get 60, how many of them are going to be Mike Castle types? If you have a majority 51 to 52 but four or five of them are RINOs, then do you really have a voting party majority on issue? You don't. You do have enough for chairmanships, which is a big deal, but at 51 to 52, here's something to think about: Fifty-one to 52 seats... Let's keep it at 51 because that seems to be the apple of these Republican consultants' eyes. With 51 seats in the Senate, boy, that would be nirvana -- and let's say we take the House.

You still have Obama. You don't have enough of a majority anywhere to override a veto. You have just enough votes in the Senate to get blamed for whatever happens -- and don't discount that Obama is looking forward to a Republican controlled House. Obama is running for reelection in two years. He cannot, he does not want to run against his own party. He doesn't care how many Democrats get shellacked. I'm convinced of it. He cares about him -- and if the Democrats lose the House, that's fine. He could blame the Republicans for whatever does or doesn't get done the next two years. He'll have the media backing him up and we'll be back to the same old thing. This is why the Republicans are going to have put on a different cap and be able to deal with this.

Because we're gonna get the same old, "Gridlock, gridlock, gridlock! Party of no! Republicans standing in the way and poor old Obama can't get anything done." That's what's going to happen. Gridlock would be the best thing that could happen to this country!

RUSH: And here's another thing to think about here. Fifty-one seats, 52 seats with people like Castle and Murkowski, Snowe and Collins? That's enough to give Obama "bipartisan support." That's the last thing we need is Republicans voting for the Obama agenda and have the press be able to say, "Bipartisan! The Republicans helped pass" whatever abomination Obama comes up with. These people are being defeated for a reason. They really are.

RUSH: I want to go to the UN yesterday. Two things happened at the United Nations yesterday. First, our president, "Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm," went up to the UN, and he spoke for about 12 seconds on Iran, and he said, "The door of diplomacy is still open," signaling it's okay for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to give him a call and talk about things. Twelve seconds, 15 seconds. Then he spends 15 to 20 minutes on the Israeli-Palestine situation, portrays that as the number one flash point in the world and uses "I," "me," "my" 34 times, whatever, during his speech. Now, everybody knows that the Israeli-Palestine situation, which has been going on for 50-60 years, pales in comparison to the Iranians nuking up.

Yet our president spends, figuratively, ten seconds on it. Then when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets up, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad starts into his 9/11 truther spiel where he wants to conduct an investigation to find out just what George Bush knew before 9/11. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rallied the United Nations to the belief that the United States government was in on the 9/11 attacks, and shockingly... When I see stuff like this, I gotta tell you, this depresses me and angers me at the same time. This from Rasmussen: "Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure."

Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, which means that if you think he knew then you have to believe he was complicit in it, that he was part of the whole deal. As it is, 22% believe that Bush knew about 9/11. So 35% of Democrats join Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the belief that George W. Bush and the US government knew about 9/11 in advance and in effect caused it, orchestrated it. During his speech yesterday at the United Nations -- his second speech, by the way, his second address to the UN, and nobody walks out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes these statements. Nobody walks out. I think we walked out. The US delegation walked out at some point; the European delegation walked out. But the thing about this is, folks, is that Ahmadinejad's theory resonates in his part of the world.

It resonates in that part of the world which produces terrorists and enemies who wish this country ill. Now, he gets two speeches to make this point. Then he also, in addition to saying that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance, Ahmadinejad also made the point that 9/11 was an "inside job." I've often pointed out, even during the campaign, how 160 delegations did not walk out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said this; 160 delegations did not. I've always found it interesting how close, how similar the talking points were during the presidential campaign of Ahmadinejad and the Democrats about Bush and about the Republicans and about America. I always said, "If I'm running for president and the insane lunatic leader of Iran is parroting my campaign, I would be embarrassed," but they weren't. So let's do a little side-by-side audio. Three examples. This is Ahmadinejad yesterday at the United Nations, a portion of his remarks.

AHMADINEJAD: (via female translator) For years, the inefficiency of capitalism and the existing world management structures have been exposed enough for us to understand what they mean; and the majority of states and people have begun a quest for fundamental changes, to allow justice and global relations to prevail.

RUSH: "For years the inefficiency of capitalism and the existing world management structures have been exposed, enough..." Does this not parrot not only what Obama says, but what he's doing? Obama and the Democrats also believe capitalism is a problem, as does Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, as did Fidel Castro. Capitalism is the problem. Capitalism is not the solution, capitalism is the problem. And we're undergoing fundamental changes. And he's happy about it, is Ahmadinejad, and is not Obama leading the way on that in this country? Here is Obama August 9th. Let's see. Da-da-da-da-da. It says here 1995, during an interview with Bill Thompson's Eye on Books, or his books Dreams from My Father, Obama said this about Africa.

OBAMA 1995: Many of the problems that Africa faces whether it's poverty or political suppression or ethnic conflict is just as prominent there and can't all be blamed on the effects of colonialism. What it can be blamed on is some of the common factors that affect Bosnia or Los Angeles or all kinds of places on this earth, and -- and that is, uh, the tendency for one group to try, uh, to suppress another group in the interests of power or greed or resources or what have you.

RUSH: So essentially in 1995, Obama ripping into capitalism. This time last year, Ahmadinejad essentially said at the United Nations that Obama agrees with me, quote, unquote. He said it. That didn't bother Obama. Now, yesterday in New York City, at the UN, here is Ahmadinejad once again...

AHMADINEJAD: (via female translator) Very recently the world witnessed an abhorrent and inhumane act of burning the Holy Koran. The Holy Koran is the divine book. It calls for worshiping the one God, justice, compassion toward people, development and progress, reflection and thought, defense of the oppressed, and resistance against oppressors. They burned the Koran to burn all these truths in good judgments. However, the truth cannot be burned.

HILLARY: The news is carrying reports that a pastor down in Gainesville, Florida, plans to burn the Holy Koran on September 11th. I am heartened by the clear, unequivocal condemnation of this disrespectful, disgraceful act that has come from American religious leaders of all faiths.

RUSH: Right. Now, that's all fine and dandy. I mean, nobody's here is suggesting anybody should burn the Koran. Except when the American flag's burned, Hillary don't speak up; and when the Bible is burned around the world, Hillary doesn't speak up. When America's ripped to shreds around the world, the symbols of America are burned and set on fire, or presidents are hung in effigy -- like George W. Bush -- Hillary doesn't pipe up. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. September 24th, NPR, this is 2009: "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praised Obama's speech at the U.N.," this is last year, "for marking a break with the policies of the Bush administration. The Iranian president said Obama echoed what the Iranian people and Ahmadinejad himself have been saying for many years."

So here you have the Iranian leader who gets all of ten seconds of attention from Obama by saying, "Hey, our diplomatic door is open, buddy. Come on in if you want," and then we go off and start bashing Israel, which is really what spending all that time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about. I mean, folks, does Hillary carry around the Bible? Does she carrying it around? Does she carry the Holy Bible around? Is she upset when people burn it or burn the American flag? Does she talk about Looney Toon clerics of other religions? Does she? She doesn't. The Democrat Party is amazingly close and similar to the words and utterances of some of the world's foremost radicals when the subject is the United States of America. When the subject is this country, Obama, Hillary, the Democrats, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it's hard to tell them about.

RUSH: Thank you all very, very much. It's great to be back in Philadelphia. What a beautiful place this Kimmel Center is. Look at it.

RUSH: "Performing arts." When I think of "performing arts," I think of Karen Finley dressed up nude in chocolate on the stage paid for with our tax dollars by the NEA.

RUSH: And this is very professional. There's actually, on this podium, a sign: "Please Speak Up and Into Microphone."

RUSH: Honestly, (chuckles) it's there. The last time I was here in Philadelphia... What was it? Three years ago, I think. How many of you were here that night?

RUSH: I have to meet and surpass audience expectations. Three years ago when I was here, it was the night that we announced that I was going to put Harry Reid's letter to my syndication partner up for auction on eBay. Remember that?

RUSH: Harry Reid, Dingy Harry. He could not get a vote on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell;" couldn't get a vote on cap and trade and a number of other things because he had to go to New York last night for a fundraiser for Democrats in the Senate. And he took with him Kirsten Gillibrand who is the junior senator from New York, a rubber stamp for Chuck-U Schumer, and he goes and he talks to all these senators up there and he's introducing them to the people and he gets to Kirsten Gillibrand and he says, "And what do we think of her? She's hot!" and she gets all embarrassed, because she's not that hot.

RUSH: But, but... No, I'm sorry. We're all friends here. Compared to the other Democrats in the Senate, she's a 10. She really is.

RUSH: So I take that back. But she got all embarrassed. And, of course, we are the ones who are accused of being Neanderthals, racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes. And, of course, ladies and gentlemen, we -- if I can get serious for just a second here. We are all are in the midst of a disaster. No, we really are. Something has begun. I've been doing what I've been doing on this national radio show for 23 years, and every day, every week is a learning experience for me. I know a number of you would think it hard to believe that there's anything left for me to learn.

RUSH: But... (chuckles) For these 23 years I've thought that a whole bunch of people were on our team who really aren't, and it's become crystal clear. And we talked about this piece that was in the American Spectator by Angelo Codevilla called "America's Ruling Class," which is just a brilliant, brilliant piece and it codified and it established exactly what's going on in the country today. It's not Republican versus Democrat. And by the way, this is not to say that there's no difference between the two because there clearly is. But we're in the midst here of a crossroads that I don't think any of us have ever faced in the country. I was thinking back the other day in my review of the 23 years: Make fun of liberals, talk about the things that they do and their policies. But we never, ever really thought that they would succeed to the point that the country as founded would be threatened.

But it is now. It is. This bunch -- the Obama administration, the regime -- is a disaster. They have succeeded in a year and a half. If we conservatives ever get power back, if we would implement as much of our agenda in a year and a half as Obama has succeeded in implementing, we would be throwing parties! Nationalizing car companies. Nationalizing the healthcare business. Daily assaults on freedom. And what we've learned that's shocking to us, is so many people on our side still don't see that. They still see it as a traditional Republican versus Democrat. "We'll share power here. We'll get some judges this year; you get some judges next year," and we're in a crossroads now where that's not the case. I was listening to Obama's speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Awards Banquet.

RUSH: You have to be a highly trained specialist to be able to say that without stuttering.

RUSH: Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Awards Banquet. And Obama is up addressing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and he says (interruption), "You know, before we got here..."

RUSH: "Long before we got here, this great land was occupied by Mexicans, Spaniards, Dutch, Germans, French," Martians.

RUSH: You know, when you hear people talk about what was here before America was founded in a positive way, that's right out of the multicultural curriculum that has invaded public education in this country for the last 25 years. Now, to translate Obama, what he really means is: "Back in the good old days. Back before white Europeans arrived and brought syphilis, racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, and environmental destruction. Back in the good old days when the Indians were at one with the country, with the nation, with nature and so forth -- and back when everybody was hunky dory getting along." It's hard for people to get their arms around the fact that the country has elected somebody who has a grudge against the country.

RUSH: People still don't want to believe it. And I am as serious about this as I have ever been about anything. I have no doubt that for whatever reason -- and we can go through the list of what it is that Obama doesn't like about the country. I know he's been educated, informed and raised to not like this country from his father who didn't like colonialism. His grandfather was run out of Kenya, the Mau Mau revolution, the Great British revolution at the time and that's why Obama got rid of the bust of Winston Churchill first thing in the Oval Office. He didn't just put it in the basement. He sent it back to the British embassy. He has a genuine animus. It's not an accident that when it comes time to give a gift, he picks 25 DVDs at random from Amazon and doesn't even send the correct country codes so the Prime Minister can watch them.

He's got an axe to grind with the country. He doesn't like it. He has been raised that this country as founded was unjust and immoral and he is hell bent on a course to change it, to cause us to have to pay the price for this. Now, you say this -- and you've heard me say it on the radio daily -- and if you're immersed in this stuff daily and if you're honest, if you're honest with yourself about what you see and what you read; you can't conclude anything other than that. But a lot of people, even who voted for him who are not happy now, they just can't get their arms around the fact that we've elected somebody who has that view of the country. Sadly a lot of people on what I call "our side" of the aisle, the so called conservative media intelligencia inside the Beltway, they just think that he's misguided, wrong, doesn't understand economics, and is a little like a doofus.

And he may be all of that, but he's much more. He has a plan. He's the architect of reforming this country in a way that we wouldn't recognize it as founded. There's no way -- folks, there's no way -- anybody that has the ability to be honest with themselves can look at his economic policies after a year and a half of utter, from our perspective, failure. Job destruction. I mean, the unemployment rate continues to climb. People have stopped looking for work. It is a disaster out there -- and nobody in their right mind, after a year and a half of this, would say we need more of it. People would say, "This isn't working!" This is his fault. We've had a year and a half of debt that has accrued, in his year and a half, that is more than all the debt from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Yet he blames George W. Bush for it and he blames us! He blames the American people. He says, "No, the days of the American people, the days of America leading the world economically are over." The hell they are! They are not over.

RUSH: We all love the country. We all want for our children and grandchildren, great grandchildren, the opportunities that we were all born into. I mean, that's the point. That is the purpose. The people who make the country work are in this room and in rooms like this all over the country. The people who make the country work are anonymous. They are not seeking fame. They are not trying to get noticed. They are not trying to get noticed on reality TV shows. They are not trying to get noticed on gossip columns in newspapers and so forth. They are out there struggling against the obstacles that have been placed in their way by this administration, trying to hold on and preserve the American dream. And now they have risen up and become a political force called the Tea Party.

RUSH: And... and... (chuckles) I watch this and I'm enthused and I'm optimistic about it each and every day. Let's talk about Christine O'Donnell for just a second.

RUSH: Now, people have asked me, "How come you haven't endorsed Christine O'Donnell?" Ladies and gentlemen, I generally don't endorse in primaries. I mean, politicians come and go, and you never know what they're going to do tomorrow. I am forever.

RUSH: But seriously. (chuckles) Here's a woman who hasn't done anything to anybody. She literally hasn't done anything to anybody, and look at what they're saying about her. It's a repeat, a recast of what they said about Sarah Palin, and all of it is just total BS. And I've gotten to the point where I don't care for it anymore. I'm really totally angry about it, and I don't think it's going to work anymore, and these people need to be shouted down on it.

RUSH: Because the real danger, the real danger facing this country is in power. The real danger facing this country is in the White House; it's in the Congress. The Republicans don't have the votes to stop anything and yet the Republicans are being blamed for all of this? It's patently absurd. I was watching Fox News the other night. I was surfing around. I don't watch cable news at night much anymore because Ted Baxter's act has gotten old.

RUSH: Did you see Ted Baxter is joining the blackmail brigade now? On Christine? Bill Maher's says, "I'm going to release a video a week until she comes on my show." O'Reilly has gotten into it and O'Reilly says, "Oh, yeah, she's been on this show. I've got some video. I'm not saying I'm going to release it, but if she doesn't come on The Factor, I may release it." What is this? What is the point? The woman hasn't done anything to anybody. All she has done is come from nowhere and get rid of a RINO that had no business being in -- was not going to be helpful at all in -- the United States Senate.

RUSH: So anyway, I'm watching Judith Miller who, to the New York Times, is a conservative.

RUSH: She was on Special Report with Bret Baier and it was the day Obama went out and had that town hall meeting with his supposed supporters that told him, "Hey, is this it? Is this our new reality?"

RUSH: And he's secretly saying, "Yeah, get used to it. It's exactly the new reality." I mean, he thinks this country needs to pay a price for all of the oppression, all of the raping of the countryside and natural resources that we've done around the world. That's how he looks at the country. Why does anybody doubt this? Jeremiah Wright? He was in the church for 20 years. "Oh, he didn't hear what Jeremiah Wright said." Oh! Oh, yeah. Okay. Right. He was a member of the church for 20 years and he didn't hear a word Jeremiah Wright said. Why would we think he did? They did a poll on Obama. They did a poll -- how many Americans think he's a Muslim -- and they were stunned. The media was shocked that 20% of the country thinks he's a Muslim. Why did they do the poll? I mean, it wasn't our poll. We didn't do it!

RUSH: It was the State Controlled Media that did it. Why did they do it? It means there's some doubt. Now, let's see. Barack... Hussein...

RUSH: Father born in Kenya. Barack Hussein Obama who said that one of the most beautiful sounds in the world is the daily Muslim call to prayer. Why would anybody think he's a Muslim?

RUSH: I don't get the connection. Now, the media tries to -- and by the way, I don't know. This is the point. We know more about Christine O'Donnell than we know about Barack Obama, and he's president!

RUSH: And that's not right. I don't know what he is. Now, don't misunderstand. I didn't come here -- because I'm sure that there are some media plants out there, and you people know who you are. They sneak in here. There were some people scalping tickets to this thing outside, I'm told. I hope whoever paid above face value is in the media.

RUSH: But I don't know whether he is, but the fact... Is it not a little disturbing, disconcerting about the president of the United States? People don't know. I mean, folks, somebody hasn't been doing their job -- and if 20% of the American people think so and the media has done their best to say, "Why, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, Obama's not Muslim. Why would anybody think that? Obama's a Christian!" Well, how would you know? You hate Christians! The media makes fun of Christianity. This is the contradiction. They run out and Christianity is the one religion you can mock, you can make fun of, you can insult all day long. No Christian will ever threaten to blow you up or blow up your building or whatever. They just sit there and take it. But you can make fun of them all day long. The media does it every day. Now all of a sudden they want to say Obama's one of us.

RUSH: It's right in front of our face the danger that we face here. And folks, really, when he was elected, I have to be honest with you, I was... I don't get depressed much, but I was on the verge of it. "What if this election means that we've lost the country? What if the election of Barack Obama means enough Americans have been convinced to invest in nothing?" His campaign was platitudinous nothings. (impression) "Todaaaaay! Todaaaay people will remember as the day the sea level began to fall." What?

RUSH: We're told he's the one that's brilliant and Christine O'Donnell's an idiot and he's out there saying, "I'm going to lower the sea levels. People will remember today." Really? Joe Biden, from Delaware, says he's second in line to the presidency!

RUSH: And yet it's all of our people who are supposedly unsophisticated, stupid. Obama thinks there are 57 states! He went to all of them and campaigned in them. Look at what Obama really believes: All this spending will create jobs. For who? Maybe the public sector is growing, but they don't produce anything. Oh, I keep saying that and I'm wrong. They do now. They make the Volt.

RUSH: Anyway, back to Judith Miller. I'm sure you thought I'd lost my place, but I haven't.

RUSH: So I'm watching Judith Miller on Fox with Bret Baier, and she's explaining how brilliant Obama's performance was at that town hall meeting on CNBC where his own supporters told him life sucks because of him.

RUSH: I'm not going to lose my place. I actually got e-mail from people who tell me I was being set up, that that whole thing was staged, that those people were to say that kind of stuff so we'd feel sorry for Obama. I said, "Look, you people are being too smart by half. You don't have somebody show up and say, 'Look, I thought you were going to help. I believed in you. I thought we were going to have all this wonderful stuff; we got nothing with you. Is this my new reality?'" That's not a setup. You know, and Obama sat there smiling. He took it as a compliment!

RUSH: He did! He's standing there smiling. "Oh, thank you, thank you," because that's what he's out to do. So Judith Miller said, "That was very effective; I think what Obama did is going to really help the Democrats come back and win in November. Because what he did was he took the economic circumstances of today and he correctly said that it's the result of two unfunded wars and two unfunded tax cuts," and she, a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance, was serious! She believes it. Folks, the ignorant stupidity... We're going to have to redefine "smart" because it's on their side. All these supposed Harvard and Yale educated cookie cutters? They are the most ignorant. They don't know real life experience. They don't understand it.

RUSH: They make fun of it. They look down on it. They impugn it. Okay. So, Ms. Miller says two unfunded wars and two unfunded tax cuts have led to the current economic disaster. How about unfunded Medicare? How about unfunded Social Security? How about unfunded everything? Nothing the government is doing is funded. We're broke! We're in debt to the tune of, what, $4 trillion, or more. The national deficit is bordering on $13 trillion. Nothing is paid for. We're finding out nothing here has been real. Look at all these unfunded pensions and healthcare plans for state employees in California and Illinois, and she really believes it, believes that she can convince the American people that they don't have jobs because of two wars that "weren't paid for" -- one of them still going on by the way, in Afghanistan -- and two unpaid-for tax cuts. Well, nothing Obama has done is paid for, and this is the problem. The spending, the out of control spending -- which is putting every one of us with our children and grandchildren in debt -- is exactly why the spending is the issue. That's why there has been a rising up of average, ordinary, God bless them, American people who know that this is unsustainable and can't be maintained.

RUSH: You know, I love tweaking the media each and every day. It's easy. By the way, I'd like to leave the house lights up. A lot of people don't want to see the audience. They're afraid of audience reactions. They just want the spotlight on them. I like the house lights up because I like to spot the liberals in the crowd.

RUSH: It's easy. You can see them out there. You know who you are. You're sitting next to 'em.

RUSH: They've been dragged here. They are not really sure they want to come and they don't even want to enjoy it -- and they don't want to laugh so much that they just will not let themselves be seen laughing. They will not let themselves be seen having a good time because nobody should be having a good time. So it's not fair if you are if they're not. But I can see them. I like to know who the liberals are. And I'm looking at you. I've spotted you. I've spotted all of you.

RUSH: I love it. So I love to tweak the media each and every day, and it's easy to do. I even tell them I'm going to do it and they fall for it!

RUSH: They think, the media thinks that 20% of the American people believe Obama's a Muslim because I began calling him "Imam Obama."

RUSH: The problem is, they took this poll on how many people think he's a Muslim long before I started calling him Imam Obama. Why would anybody think Obama's a Muslim? He only wants to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed to trial in New York City and he wants to build a mosque at Ground Zero

RUSH: Now, you stop and think of that for a second. This is somebody who either doesn't understand why that's a bad idea, or does understand it's a bad idea and wants to just ram it down everybody's throats. Which? It's the latter, right? You think it's the latter?

RUSH: It's perfectly understandable. Here's a guy and his absolutely insane attorney general, Eric Holder, who wants to bring a guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who said, "Please kill me. Martyr me! I want to meet the 72 virgins. Kill me at Club Gitmo. Kill me." "No, no! We're going to bring you to New York and we're going to put you on trial. We're going to give you a three year forum to tell the world how rotten the United States is." That's what that trial's for, and it's going to cost $200 million a year that we don't have, unfunded security, for this trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a couple other of his henchmen? And everybody says, "Rush, don't worry about it. They'll never find a jury that will acquit." (chuckles) Oh, really? In New York?

RUSH: But why would anybody think that Obama has a problem with America when he wants to do this? I mean, it's just, it's out there and it's so obvious and it's so serious and it's so real that people just can't face it. So they'll put it out of their minds or they'll delay thinking about it or what have you, but it really is an issue. We're at a crossroads here. Socialism, communism around the world has failed everywhere it's been tried.

RUSH: Even Fidel Castro -- did you see this? By the way, I got married. You see this? It's wife GPS, wife GPS.

RUSH: Do you know Joy Behar? If there's anybody ever inappropriately named, it's Joy Behar. There's somebody who's never happy. I used to work next door to her at WABC in New York. I mean, there's not a happy day in the woman's life.

RUSH: She's still -- her butt's so tightly scrunched up because Elton John sang at my wedding. She just can't believe it!

RUSH: I remember the New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a couple of years ago, invited me to go out on the town with her on a January night in New York. You know, I just love going into liberal enclaves and just blowing the places up. It's like this. This is an electronic cigarette. Pull this baby out in an elevator and watch the liberals panic.

RUSH: I was over playing golf in Hawaii at a bar and whipped one of these things out. It's water vapor. There's no tobacco; there's no flame. And the manager comes up, "Mr. Limbaugh, really, I'm sure you know we don't allow smoking here in the bar." I said, "I'm not smoking. This is an electronic cigarette," and I unscrewed the filter, the cartridge to explain it to him he says, "Oh, oh, okay." He walks away fine. I keep puffing away at it. He comes back in five minutes: "Mr. Limbaugh, ummm, uhhh, people say you are setting a bad example. One woman said you're really enjoying it too much. Could you...?"

RUSH: So when Cindy Adams calls and says, "Would you like to go to an HBO private screening?" I say, "Yes."

RUSH: -- who was playing the character Doris Duke, the tobacco queen, and the screening was at the Time Warner Center... Well, it's Columbus Circle somewhere. So we go in there and, folks, it is the ruling class. I mean, these people we talk about, these self-defined elites. But when we call them "elites," they are not better than us. That's not what we mean. They think they are better than everybody else, but they aren't. They are a minority. We're being governed, we're being ruled by a minority, and that's going to change starting in November. But more on that in just a second.

RUSH: So... So I walk in with Cindy Adams, and you could just see. Tina Brown and her husband Harry what's his face, Harry Evans. Harry Evans. Short little guy. Tina's about here. You see that and you wonder: How does it work?

RUSH: And their eyes bug out. They look at me. They just can't believe it. They look at Cindy: "Why did you drag him in here?" So guess who I see taking off her coat and checking it? Joy Behar.

RUSH: And she doesn't see me. Now, we literally worked together at WABC in New York for, I guess two or three years, and I was very helpful to her. ABC was trying to get her a television talk show for years, and I went up to New Haven, Connecticut, to do a pilot with her and I flew out to Hollywood to do a pilot. I helped her every time she asked me to appear on her television pilots, and still she hates me!

RUSH: So I see her and she's with this guy that has been her boyfriend for 15 years. I mean, this guy, believe me, is so henpecked, the only thing he does behind her back is zip her up.

RUSH: If it weren't for his varicose veins, the guy would be totally colorless. So I see Joy over there and I walk up and I just give her a big hug: "Joy, how are you?" and she acts like she's being raped! She panicked. She freaked! "Oh, my God!" She sees me. "YOU! How did YOU get in here?" She really said that: "How did YOU get in here?" I said, "Cindy Adams brought me." I mean, it was the last place I was supposed to be. I love just tweaking these people -- and they sat me right behind Susan Sarandon in the screening

RUSH: And right next to her daughter. And Susan Sarandon, of course, comes in late because she's the star. And she goes to the stage to explain this brilliant, moving role that she played, and comes down and takes her seat and sees that it's right in front of me -- and Cindy Adams is seated to my left. She turns to Cindy and she says, "This is one heck of a photo op." So I love it. I just love tweaking these people. You can do it each and every day because the truth of the matter is that they live in their little enclaves and they are insecure. At the end of the day they're all very insecure, and this is why they band together. But their insecurity has led to a pompous arrogance in the way they deal with everybody, and it has infected people on our side in Washington, DC. You know, the liberals do run that town. They run it politically, they run it socially, and everybody wants to be part of it. In your neighborhood you want to matter, you want to live and be friends. You don't want to be antagonistic with people. So too many of our people have gone out of their way to try to say, "We're not like those Limbaugh wackos." Some of them, like National Review magazine. It used to be Bill Buckley's magazine: "Stand to thwart history and say, 'Stop!'" And now they're in this chorus that says Christine O'Donnell can't get elected. It's silly. I look at it: Here's a magazine founded by a man, William F. Buckley, whose intention was to have the countryside strewn with the carcasses of liberals everywhere.

RUSH: And now they're invoking "the Buckley Rule," the Buckley Rule which means "support the most electable conservative." Well, I don't know how you support Mike Castle. He's not a conservative. He's a RINO. Harry Reid couldn't wait! Harry Reid couldn't wait for Mike Castle to get there and join him in voting on cap and trade. So one of the points that I want to make about all of this and the Tea Party is that I still run into people. Despite the successes of the Tea Party and the overwhelming polling data that suggest a really successful November, people are still in some cases depressed and insecure because they don't see their values, their success stories represented in traditional media. Traditional media still impugns, laughs at, and makes fun of us all -- and they're not media folks. They really never have been. This is one of the things. I used to think they were not objective reporters. I knew there were liberals, but now they're activists and they are making no pretense. They don't report news. They are just activists now. They are out trying to further an agenda. It's Obama's agenda. It's the Democrat Party's agenda. So anybody who is expecting them to be fair or honest in recognizing things we succeed at, you're always going to be disappointed. Take solace in the fact that last week the three nightly newscast shows -- Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric -- lost 700,000 more viewers.

RUSH: That's big. Here's the difference. This, of course, will never happen, but if the radio ratings came out and I had lost 700,000 listeners, the last thing I would do is say, "Those stupid people." I'd say, "What am I not doing here? How have I failed to connect? How have I let the audience down?" They don't. The news business is the only business where the customer is not only wrong, he's an idiot!

RUSH: You call and complain and they say, "Well, I'm sure you can't understand the way we do our jobs. You can't understand the process by which we put together the news. It's really, really beneath our ability to explain it to you." So they lose viewers, and they're happy about it because they think they're getting rid of the rubes. I watch. I have the news on during my show every day just because you never know. Some car chase might happen and you have to comment on it, some big news story.

RUSH: And I happen to see Andrea Mitchell (NBC News-Washington) and she'll have... did I say something wrong? Or it's potty time? Oh, good. Whew! (chuckles) The future of the country right there and I come this close to blowing it.

RUSH: So I watch these shows, folks. I watch and I realize -- like let's say she will have as her guest F. Chuck Todd.

RUSH: F. Chuck is the -- what is he? -- White House correspondent, NBC News political director. He's a journalist in good standing. And I see him talking to Andrea and Andrea talking, and they're not talking to an audience. They're talking to themselves and they're talking to other news people watching. F. Chuck is hoping Bob Schieffer's watching and is impressed. F. Chuck hopes Walter Cronkite's watching from the Great Newsroom Up There and is impressed. F. Chuck hopes that other news people are watching. He hopes the New York Times editors are watching. They do it for each other. They write their articles, their columns, news stories for each other. They don't connect with their audience. We in the new media present to them a giant question mark. They do not understand how it is that our enterprises are successful and growing. They have to say that you are my robots. They have to insult you. It can't be that you and I share the same values. It can't be that what I really do is simply validate what you already think. You know, I don't teach you anything.

RUSH: The secret... The secret to my success is I happened to come along in 1988. Back then look at what there was. There was ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News, local rag newspapers, and CNN. That was it. And I came along and there was no national conservative voice in the media. So I fill the void -- and our business plan did not say, "We're going to fill a void. We're going to be the only conservative voice." I just said, "I'm going to do a good show. I'm going to try to attract an audience. I'm going to be honest about the things I believe and roll the dice and see if it works," and it did. To this day people, even in talk radio on competing stations or on the leftist side, do not understand the recipe for success. It's so simple. It's right out in front. You be honest, you have a connection with the audience, you have credibility, and they believe you. You never, you never steer them wrong as a host. You build the loyalty. And we haven't lost any dollars, we haven't lost any audience in 23 years. We're growing while they're all plunging and falling apart.

RUSH: But in truth, in truth what it is is a very...almost humbling thing for me to have this large an audience. I mean, they put out 15 million listeners. It's more like 23 to 25 million in a week. To have people like you show up here, I'm in awe of it every day. I don't... When I say, "I have to meet and surpass audience expectations every day," I do. I do not take you being here or listening on the radio for granted for even a moment.

RUSH: It's not just that I love you all knowing what you believe and what you want for the country. It's I respect your intelligence. I don't talk down to you, I don't assume that you're ignorant or a novice, and a lot of people in the conservative media are the same way. We're just real people. We have a genuine connection, and it drives them nuts -- and when they have to resort to impugning you, me, all it does is strengthen us, and it makes us more committed than ever to oppose them and defeat them. They have created this monster themselves.

RUSH: You know, every day is a learning experience for me, and I want to tell you a little bit about how I got started doing this because I was in radio for a number of years as a disc jockey. I was only allowed to speak over the intros to music and then only allowed to talk about the music. I was at Pittsburgh at a station owned by ABC, and the program director's admonishment was: "Music over music," meaning if you were to play a Michael Jackson song, you were to talk about Michael Jackson -- and if it was Billie Jean, you had 15 seconds to talk about Michael Jackson. So I would love to play The Show Must Go on by Three Dog Night that had a 45 second intro. That was my first opportunity to do what I'm doing now came in Sacramento in --

RUSH: You listened when you were 11 but your parents probably had you listening before then. So she's a genuine, literal Rush Baby, okay? And look. Look where she is.

RUSH: You know what? She works for the Tea Party. Stand up! Stand up, stand up. She works for the Tea Party.

RUSH: Now, I got to Sacramento, and I don't want to belabor this, but I had never been allowed to do a radio show the way I wanted to -- and nobody in radio really was except for morning people. People who did morning shows, they were allowed to have a little bit more leeway. But it was always program directors saying that you have to do this. And the thing I faced when I first started the show is you have to have guests.

"Well, it's because everybody does, and I want to do something nobody else does."

I said, "I don't care about authors. I'm the expert. I don't want to have to defer. I can't get any better guests than they can get down the road in San Francisco. Why? I don't want to talk about carrot cake recipes during the holidays or the problems with the fire hydrants in the city. Why do I want to talk about it?"

And this was October of '84. This was the reelection of Reagan's second term, and I surveyed the market, and nobody was talking about it. So I lucked out. I won't tell you how, but they finally left me alone. Well, they stole a morning team from a competing radio station across the street and then left me alone. They just forgot about me. It was the best thing that ever happened, because I was able to do three hours the way I wanted to do it. No guests, just... I mean whatever I wanted to do: News, commentary, play music and so forth. And I always tried to... You know, I love parody and satire.

Now, some of you may have heard this story, but for those of you who haven't it will explain a little bit about how I approach what I do, how seriously I take it. There was a news story, just a tiny little paragraph news story. An Ohio minister was demanding that the TV show Mr. Ed be banned because he had played the theme song backwards and found a Satanic message. (laughter) No, honest. It was just a little blurb of a story and I looked at that and I said, "Okay, now, if I just say that and a couple of laughing comments, I have, what, five minutes worth of stuff out of it."

Well, at the time there was a thing happening called The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, and it was a bunch of wild-eyed, dope-smoking, long-haired FM maggot-type people who were marching from California to Washington. And when they got to Washington they were going to stage a die in on the steps of the energy department building and they were going to basically pour red paint and depict themselves as bloodied at the very moment of a nuclear blast. And I was chronicling this. I mean, this was a daily event and I'd call people in the various cities that they were stopping to get reports on it and I came up with a theme song by Slim Whitman, Una Paloma Blanca, One White Dove, and I was playing that as the update theme to the daily news story of the global peace march.

Then this Ohio minister's story hits. I said, "What if I find a Satanic message in the Slim Whitman song?" Now, how many of you have heard this story? Can I see a show of hands? Okay. So a lot of people have. So those of you who have heard it please indulge me. So I went into the production room and there's no such thing as a turntable that plays records backwards, and there wasn't then. You had to put the song on a tape recorder and play that backwards, and I had the production director, a guy named Don Grant put his voice through a harmonizer, you can make it sound however you want. He recorded a message that you could only hear if you played the song backwards.

So the next day I started the program telling people that I had been saddened and shocked to learn that I had been used, co-opted by evil during my peace march updates and I was seriously thinking of resigning because I had unwittingly exposed all of you to it, evil. And I didn't know what to do about this and I said, "Even though I've realized it now through the grace of God, who's to say it won't happen again? I didn't know it would happen this time. The devil had got me once; the devil can get me another time. Now, I'm not going to tell you what it is that I said to you, the audience. Just trust me, it's bad, and I'm sorry and I'm really at a crossroads here. I'll decide what to do about this by the end of the week." So naturally the phones start ringing off the hook: "What did you do? What happened?" "No, I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me." Then the management of the station started getting phone calls from local pastors.

RUSH: Congregations were calling, "There's some guy on the radio saying that he was spreading Satanic messages, Satanism." So this was working out great.

RUSH: I hadn't done anything but everybody's talking about it. So after three days of this, the general manager of the station walked into the studio at a commercial break and said, "How long are you going to go with this?" And I said, "I think we have at least another week to milk this."

RUSH: He said, "Okay, well, just use your judgment here, be careful." I said, "Okay, I will." So I finally relented to public pressure and said, "Okay, I've been pressured, local ministers, station management has demanded that I reveal what I have discovered about how I have been a tool of evil. They think you have a right to know. I'm doing this under protest and under duress; I do not think I should be doing this." I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, thanks to the brilliant work of a minister in Ohio who discovered a Satanic message in the Mr. Ed TV show theme song, I have found a Satanic message in Slim Whitman's Una Paloma Blanca, my update theme song for the global peace march."

And people said, "Well, you've got to play it." I said, "No, that's as far as I'm going to go. I am not going to subject you. You already have heard it. Don't you understand? That's the point. It's there. It's a subliminal thing. It hits you, and I've exposed you to it!" "No, we want to hear it. We want to hear it." I had them in the palm of my hand. I knew exactly. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to do this, but," you know, the usual cautions and warnings, "just be careful with this. This could shatter everything you hold dear. It can shatter every belief that you've ever had. I know you can't sign a release, but I want you all to understand here that I think you're probably safe, since you know it's coming, you can save yourself, you can prepare yourself for it."

So I play the song backwards, which is better, by the way, than when you play it the regular direction. Slim Whitman yodels Una Paloma Blanca (singing). So at 30 seconds into the song, the message that we recorded came on. It was this: "Beeeeeeeelzebub. Yes, it's me, the old devil himself lurking right here in the Slim Whitman record grooves. You know, me and my disciples are wondering where you got a turntable like this to hear this message that play records backwards. Well, we're just glad you did, and I have to be heading on the way down the line." Now, I'm playing this and I'm thinking I have just pulled off one of the most brilliant pieces of parody and satire. I'm thinking Johnny Carson's going to be calling to have me as a guest on the Tonight Show. And the phones are ringing off the hook and I'm looking and the call screener is in a panic -- because people believed it.

RUSH: Well, some people. Some people calling believed it. Now, I was not prepared for that. I mean, Beelzebub, it's the old devil himself lurking here in the Slim Whitman record grooves. But this has a point. This taught me something. So now what do I do with this? I thought something was going to establish me as something -- one, they don't get it, at least these people calling. You know the percentage of people that listen to a talk show that call it is less than 1/10th of 1%. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people listening to a talk show never call. So you never do the show for callers. You do it for the audience. And the callers end up being props one way or the other. They're good props, bad props. All of the callers make the host look good, not by complimenting but by setting up like these people. So I said, "Gosh, what am I going to do?" So I had to change gears. People would say, "I've got every Slim Whitman record! Do you think there are other Satanic messages? What should I do?"

RUSH: I said, "Ma'am, look how easily I was co opted. I wouldn't take a chance. I'd throw them away. I'd burn them." Thank God that there was no Dittocam. I mean, I'm laughing myself silly. I'm losing my composure doing this. And these people kept calling and thanking me and telling me that I was not going to have to resign, that God had stepped in and saved me, had alerted me to this. This was a good sign that I was helping people also learn that they had been exposed to evil and they didn't have to succumb to it. My head's sinking. And so I'm accepting their thanks, and the ministers are still calling the general manager and finally a guy calls, skeptic.

RUSH: We did. We finally got a skeptic. He said, "You know, I have that Slim Whitman record. I don't believe this for a minute. There's no Satanic message in the song; it's not possible. In fact, I have the record and I don't have a turntable that plays backwards but I put the needle on, I've been spinning it backwards and there's no Satanic message there. You can't fool me. I think it's a crime, it's an insult what you're doing." I said, "Sir, what year was your turntable made?"

RUSH: That's the only thing I could think of. He said, "I don't know, maybe 1982." "Well, that's the thing. See, your, your turntable has disgronification circuitry in it." "What's that?" I said, "Well, what it does, it cancels the high end and the low end, the bass and treble and it compresses them in the midrange and Satanic messages are on the high end and the disgronifier takes them out of there." "You mean, if I go get a new turntable and I spin it backwards?" I said, "Yes, sir." We had a sponsor that sold us one. I said, "You go to Philco and buy one; you'll hear it." Now, there are two factions of the audience on this one: The people that didn't get it, which is a minority, the people calling; and the people who did, who were in on it who had the sense to understand it was a parody and so forth.

But what it taught me was that in my case, why did people believe it? They believed it because I said it. They trusted me. And they may not have understood that I was trying to be funny with it, because I hadn't spent a lot of time on the Ohio minister. I did not make fun of the guy. I just reported it as a news story the same as any other news story. And from that day forward, I've made mistakes in this regard, I've done parodies and not closed the loop at the end of the day and gotten into some trouble with it, but I've never taken for granted the fact that you and the rest of the audience have a trust in me that I should never, ever tamper with and play with or take for granted. The worst example of this was sometimes I assume everybody listens three hours a day every day and they're with me and they know and they understand totally what I'm about and so forth. (applause)

And not everybody does. I think they will understand my frustrations and anger about various things. A guy called while we're discussing the defense budget. I had moved to New York, it was my national show. We were discussing the defense budget and the guy calls up and says, "You have no right to talk about a defense budget. You didn't go to Vietnam. You had a chance to go kill commies and you didn't go. I mean, you don't have the right." I said,

"What is this? People who haven't served can't talk about military policy?" "That's right. You can't talk about it." I said, "Sir, you know what? You actually have a good point. You know, I come from a very small town, powerful family in a small town and I didn't go kill commies. You know why, sir? My father went down to the draft board and wrote them a check for $3,000 and I got a 4 F." Now see, it was the last call of the day. I'm thinking, I dealt with that guy, you know, dealing with idiocy with idiocy, illustrating absurdity by being absurd. Well, I get home and my dad calls and says, "What?" just screaming at me.

RUSH: Family members from Memphis to Chester, Illinois are calling him demanding that something happen to me because I've so sullied the reputation of the family name and so forth. And I said, "Come on, you mean people believed it?" "Yes, son, because you said it." So my point with all this is that now, when I tell you that I think Barack Hussein Obama has a grudge against this country, thinks it was founded in an immoral, unjust way and is hell bent on making us pay the price for whatever he thinks we have done in an unjust, colonial, immoral way, I mean it. I am not being outrageous just to get a reaction.

RUSH: That's right from my heart. As I said earlier, during the course of my 23 years, liberalism has always been something to laugh at. They are more fun when they are out of power because that's when they get hysterically ridiculous. When they're in power they're dangerous. You have to take them a little bit more seriously. But never, never did I think that a majority of people would elect somebody who had as his objective to fundamentally change and reform the country because he resents it. I never thought it would happen. So that's a big shock, and to try to convey this to people. I ask myself, "Have I been too lackadaisical for 22 years? Somehow, was I not serious enough at the right times?" You know, I ask myself, you and I, we are immersed in reality every day. Whatever it is, it's a hard, cold reality. We don't live in euphemisms. We don't live in fantasy worlds.

We might dream and we certainly do, but we don't live in them. We don't promise ourselves a utopia. We understand the obstacles that we face. We accept them. We love the challenge; we love overcoming them; we love teaching and raising our children to do the same thing. We love telling people you're better than you think you are. We love to tell people that the country depends on you, the country's greatness is because of you, you're the ones making it work. We now have an administration and an entire government who thinks the country is what it is because the people of this country are somehow inferior, stupid, idiots. And that offends the hell out of me. And I asked myself, "Did I not take these people seriously enough long ago, could we have prevented this?" How is it that a majority of people in that campaign -- I mean, maybe it was hypnosis? How is it? I ask myself how is it that people actually will believe some guy who says he's going to lower the sea levels. Why does even one person believe Al Gore on anything? I'm serious. That movie of his, the book, all of it is a fraudulent lie.

RUSH: And then I'm watching the opening weekend of the NFL. By the way, a shout-out to Kevin Kolb. Did you see the headline in the Philadelphia paper today? "Michael Vick, Top Dog"? Whoa! I saw that, I said, "What does Vick think of that?" I mean, I came out dressed in black today in honor of Andy Reid.

RUSH: Oh, gee, I've gone over the limit. So I'm watching the opening week of the NFL season. There's a Nissan commercial of a polar bear. There's a polar bear walking through the countryside of a little town, the highways and byways and going through the neighborhoods. A polar bear, and cars and trucks are driving by it. No big deal. Polar bear, hey. Polar bear, "Hi, how are you?" The polar bear shows up on some schlub's driveway who happens to be driving one of these electric hoax cars, the Prius or whatever. The Prius, by the way, if you want to drive one, that's fine and dandy, just don't think you are saving anything. It's like people who wear these ribbons: "See this ribbon? I'm better than you. I care more than you." That's people driving Priuses, "I care more." You know what? I drive a Maybach and it gets four miles to the gallon and I love giving those Priuses anals. I get right behind, flash the lights, zoom around them.

RUSH: Folks, it bothers me that so many Americans actually think that the light bulbs they use, that the appliances they use will cause the climate to change. It bothers me that people are that gullible and stupid. I understand how it happened. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to think their life has meaning. And a lot of people don't. But if they are told that they can save the planet by putting in some stupid spaghetti light bulb or drive around in a little accident-waiting-to-happen car, well, they will do it. And it shouldn't bother me because it's freedom, but if they're doing it because it's a political statement, if it's a political decision, it bothers me because I know I'm looking at a stupid liberal behind the wheel, and I just...

RUSH: I have compassion. Don't misunderstand. I have compassion, but I'm getting to a point in my life where I don't suffer fools as easily as I used to. So I'm watching this Nissan commercial and the polar bear finally gets to this guy's house and he sneaks up on the guy who's coming out to go to work, get in his little lawnmower with four seats on it. And the polar bear comes up, and this guy: "Oh, my God, it's a polar bear!" The polar bear hugs him. Thank you. Polar bear: "Thank you for driving this little piece of crap car and saving my iceberg."

RUSH: I look at that and I think, "My god, we are losing this country." This is a company trying to sell cars with this. Their marketing people think this is a way to get people to buy that car, and it probably is. And I'm thinking this is irresponsible because somebody is going to see a polar bear and try to hug the thing and they are going to get killed! And it's going to be Nissan's fault. But ultimately it's going to be Al Gore's fault. This whole global warming thing is classic, quintessential liberalism. It's a lie. All of liberalism is a lie. It's a hoax! It is.

RUSH: It's like anything else in liberalism. It has as its purpose to control our lives, to have power over us, and it plays on the common human emotion of guilt: I'm going to make them feel guilty for destroying the climate, but I'm going to also tell them they can save it. All they've got to do is drive around piece of crap cars and pay higher taxes. All they've got to do is move into smaller houses. All they've got to do is buy one sheet of toilet paper like Sheryl Crow. These people are idiots! These people are stupid and we have to sit here and listen to Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin be insulted, and these people are absolute nimrods. So I go back and forth: How in the world did this guy get elected? Then I see the Nissan commercial and I realize we have a battle here, and some of us look at the objective: Okay, we've got to go out and change people's minds and get them to join us. I looked at the Obama CNBC thing and I saw these people ostensibly expressing problems with his policy say, "Now, there's somebody. We can go get that person." This Velma Hart was her name. This woman is ripe for the taking if we somehow get to Velma. "Yes, your answer, this is your new reality. On purpose. No future. No economic future. Yes, and you were looking right at the man, the president of the United States who's giving it to you. Yes." I wonder, "Could we convert the woman?" Then I say, "Do we have time?" The first objective is to just vote against anybody with a Democrat behind their name.

RUSH: That's what has to be done. It's time to stop being defensive and think we need to explain ourselves to them.

RUSH: They're the ones at some point who we are going to call upon and we're going to demand an accounting for the damage they have caused the country and the future.

RUSH: The days of us being defensive and thinking we have to make explanations, justifications for what we think... Folks, I want to tell you we are the epitome of decency and normal, and the people that we are facing are the ones who are the odd balls and kooks, and they are a minority, but they have the media on their side so that what they do and believe is made. They have movies and books, TV shows. What they do and think is made to look mainstream, but it's destructive as it can be. It is damaging, and have you ever seen a happy liberal? No, I'm being serious. They're not, and they're almost constitutionally unequipped for it because they don't feel happy if there's any misery anywhere. So what they want to do is spread misery equally and call it civil rights. Call it equality.

You know, we've given one life. I ask people at each of these addresses, and I did it in Philadelphia three years ago. You ever ask yourself how is it, what is the reason that a country of 250 million people came to lead the world in virtually everything, decency, goodness, economic prosperity, opportunity, you name it, in such a short number of years compared to civilizations that have been around for thousands of years? How did it happen? We're not any better human beings. I mean, there's nothing different in our DNA than Europeans or Africans. We're not anything better. There's nothing special. We're all human beings. What is it that enabled this collection of human beings to run rings around everybody else? And I mean in a decent way. Not in the Obama way. We didn't plunder the planet. The United States of America is the solution to the world's problems. Obama thinks we are the problem.

RUSH: We are a good, decent, just country with wonderful people. Yeah, we got our ne'er do wells, every country does, but we are not a country that need ever apologize for itself.

RUSH: And we certainly don't need the president of the United States, who is the most inexperienced guy in any room he walks into, apologizing for us. What is it? What is it that has enabled us? I really think it's in our founding documents. Our founders acknowledged that our rights and freedom are inherent in our creation. They come from God.

RUSH: And they put it right there in the preamble of Declaration: We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If the government doesn't stand for life, who will? The Democrat Party doesn't. Life in the hands of the Democrat Party leads to what? Death. Happiness? You want to invest your happiness in the Democrat Party? They're not happy; they don't want you to be happy. Liberty? Every policy coming out of Democrat Party is designed to shrink our liberty, to take it away and transfer it to the state for command and control. So Obama shows up at the Hispanic Caucus Institute Awards Banquet and cites the preamble, leaving out the Creator. We're all "endowed with life, liberty, pursuit of happiness." "Yada, yada, yada," he might as well say. So we folks, you and I and all the rest of us like us around the country, it's time to start thinking of ourselves as the majority because we are.

RUSH: Time to stop thinking of ourselves defensively. We don't need to seek validation from people who are never going to acknowledge who we are in the first place, the media or Democrats. We don't need Mike Castles and John McCains to cross the aisle. We don't need it. When you admit it, when you say, (imitating McCain) "That's right, Limbaugh, I can reach across the aisle! I'm the only one who can do it!" That means that you are inherently saying you're not good enough, McCain. You're only going to be good enough if you get those people to join us. Well, those people are destroying us. Why do you want to join them? I had a big dinner party in New York at Roger Ailes' house. I haven't hid this on the radio. Karl Rove was there. Christine O'Donnell's name came up. He didn't say a word. Mike Castle's name came up and Judge Napolitano was there and Neil Cavuto.

RUSH: And Roger Ailes, you would love Roger Ailes. I wish everybody in the room could meet Roger Ailes. He's just one of the most naturally funny people. And he directed the conversation at this dinner, and he actually started by saying, "There are two people --" and this embarrassed me. He said, "There are two people --"14 people, 16 at a circular table. "There are two people who changed America. One of them is Ronald Reagan and the other one's sitting here, Rush Limbaugh." And I'm saying, "No, no. No, no," embarrasses me.

RUSH: He runs around the table and he asks Cavuto and Judge Napolitano and Rove and everybody, "What do you think is going on in the country?" And they all said what they said. And then when he got to me: "Rush, what do you think?" And of course what I said nobody else had said. That's usually the way it is. I said, "Folks, I think it's time to stop thinking of ourselves as Republicans and start thinking of ourselves as conservatives because..."

RUSH: "...I'm sick and tired of hearing I'm the problem in the country. I'm sick and tired of hearing people like me are the problem. I'm sick and tired of hearing I'm racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. I'm tired of people in the Republican Party acting as though we're guilty and we have to go show these other people we're not that." And I quoted Jack Kemp. God bless him, may he rest in peace. Remember the debate when he was the vice presidential candidate for Bob Dole? He was debating... whoever the hell it was. Oh, Al Gore. Now, this is classic liberal elitism: Al Gore: "By the way, Jack, I just want to say you're not like all those other Republicans. You're not a racist." And Kemp, rather than say, "I beg your pardon?" Kemp said, "Thank you."

Too many of us are on defensive, and when they praise us, "Oh, thank God they don't think of me that way." And I said, "We have got to stop being defensive. We have got to stop." I said, "I hear the Republicans say we've got to get a 51 seat majority, we've got to get a majority, and that's why we've got to support Mike Castle." I said, "If we have a Senate with seven or eight Mike Castles that give us a majority, we are in the minority. We're electing a bunch of liberals. Why do you want to do this?"

RUSH: I said it about like that. And, of course, there's a hushed silence, and in the usual obligatory way, Roger says, "Why don't you tell us what you really think?" Somebody always says that. And Judge Napolitano said, "Do you really think that Christine O'Donnell's got --" I said, "Judge, Judge, let me tell you something. What I think is that we have got to get rid of Barack Obama and anybody who's going to vote with him. Do I think that Christine O'Donnell's better than a Barack Obama? Damn right." What is hard to figure out about this?

RUSH:? What's so hard about this? Don't get mad at the judge. He was just trying to keep the conversation going. He was not arguing with me. But it's the same thing people say: "Rush, Sarah Palin doesn't embarrass you?" No. Palin doesn't embarrass me. Obama scares me. We have got to get rid of Obama. We've got to get rid of the Democrats.

RUSH: You know something, folks? I have to tell you that one of the truest tests of where we are, it is the women in the conservative movement, the Republican Party, who have the guts right now.

RUSH: Ann Coulter was right. We got a bunch of girly men on our side running around. "You think Sarah Palin, you really think Sarah Palin can --" let me tell you something. I don't think it's even close. We're in the midst of losing the country and you want to talk to me about whether somebody went to Harvard or Yale? The fact they went to Harvard or Yale's a problem. They don't have any real life experience.

RUSH: So anyway, the trashing of the Tea Party, the criticism of people like Christine O'Donnell from our side is going to continue. And the reason it's going to happen -- you know, people have asked me, "Why is Rove doing what he's doing?" I really don't know. I mean, I can understand before an election, but after she's won? Why give the Democrats fodder for their own TV commercial? I don't understand it. We're told that when these RINOs win like Specter and these people --

RUSH: We're told, "Come on now. We have to join forces and be unified." Fine, okay. And we always do, don't we? We grit our teeth, we mutter some obscenities, but we do it. Okay. So here now the terribly sophisticated, brilliant, erudite Mike Castle won't dane to even call Christine O'Donnell and congratulate her. (audience interruption) He did call? He did call? Wait a minute now. One voice at a time. Did he call and tell her to go to hell or did he call and congratulate her? Did he say he's going to endorse her? What we found out was that Obama and Biden called Castle to commiserate after all this. Now, see, I'm just some hick from Missouri but that kind of tells me something.

RUSH: We have people on our side who want to be thought of as reasonable. We've been painted as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, extremists, so forth, and I've said on the radio a number of times that the Republican Party has its own rift. We've got northeastern liberal Republicans who do not like social issues, the pro-lifers being in the party, don't like going to the convention with them. They are embarrassed to be seen with them. Their liberal buddies in New York make fun of them for being in the same party as a bunch of Billy Bobs with gun racks in the back of a Ford 150. Plus, their wives give them hell like you wouldn't believe.

I told this story on the radio. I was in the Hamptons back in the early nineties. One of the few times I've been there. It was a dinner party at some famous people's house you would know. And after the dinner party one of them came up to me, jabbed me in the chest and said, "What are you going to do about the Christians?" I said, "What do you mean what am I going to do about the Christians?" "Well, yeah, yeah, they listen to you. What are you going to do about it?" I said, "What are you talking about?" "Abortion, man, it's killing the party. It's going to kill the party. You're going to have to tell these Christians --" "Why am I going to have to tell the Christians? Why don't you?" And this guy actually said, "My wife won't leave me alone. She's bugging me about this. You've got to do something because they listen to you."

So the people who are not with us are something that I've grown to despise, people concerned about what others think of them, people who try to be what they are based on what they think others want them to be. You know, we've all done that. We've all done that in high school. The problem is some people still haven't gotten out of high school and still live in that clique world and they're still concerned, and too many people on our side are still concerned about what those people, the left and the liberals and the people that run the show in Washington think of them. And they don't want to be thought of as unreasonable or racist or sexist. So they'll criticize us. And they'll jump in Christine O'Donnell's chili. They're afraid of being associated with her because they hear what the liberals are saying and they don't want to be laughed at like they're laughing at Christine O'Donnell. So we have two challenges. We have to prevent a third party from forming because that's going to elect Democrats from here to kingdom come.

RUSH: At the same time we have to succeed in Reaganizing the Republican Party once again.

RUSH: And that's what the Tea Party is. As for me, people ask, "Why do you still do this? I mean, could work 30 weeks a year, four days a week." Some people say, "Yeah, he already does." But I don't. "What do you have left to prove?" I said, "I'm not trying to prove anything. The way I look at what I do, I still feel blessed to have the opportunity I have. And I wish everybody had the opportunity to find in life their passion and get paid for it." I mean, I got fired a whole bunch of times and I did jobs that I was not really meant for, but had to eat. I've been fired all these times but finally found what I was born to do. And I'm doing it, and I have no desire to stop doing it, especially now because it matters so much.

RUSH: People say, "Why don't you run for office?" The pay cut. I'm not cut out for that. I could not ask anybody for a dime. I don't know how people that do that live with themselves. And they have to do it, that's part of that business. Because when you ask people for something, you're obligating yourself to get something back. If it's not money, you've got to give a piece yourself or you've got to give them some policy thing down the road if you happen to win or give them access, something they can hold over you. And then you have to keep asking because it continues to cost money. That's something that I'm not interested in doing. But there are other people who want to do that, and God bless them. And when they come along and are worthy, we support them. But my reason for continuing with this is, besides the fact that I love it, is that I really think that the times now are more important and more crucial than they ever have been. Now, I know every generation thinks that it's living in the last days. My parents thought when the Beatles came around that that was the end of it all.

RUSH: And every generation, they all think the last days, that some biblical sign is reached. I don't think we're in our last days. I don't think America's going to stop being America. The country's not going to be destroyed, but it can be fundamentally reformed so that the reason that the United States of America became the beacon of freedom around the world can change. It can be structured so that we're not the beacon of freedom anymore. We can join the ash heap of countries that are command and control, socialist democracies to one degree or another. This is something we don't want. This is something I certainly don't want, and I know you don't want it for your kids or grandkids. It's worth fighting for. It's worth taking on every challenge and opportunity to educate and inform people as much as possible.

RUSH: I always said when I grew older I was not ever going to be an fuddy duddy. And as such, I always told myself I'm never going to fall into the trap of thinking we're in the last days. I'm going to try to stay hip as best I can. But politically -- I'm not meaning to sound like a broken record, I don't mean to be redundant, but we really haven't been as close to losing the country as founded as we are today. We got close with FDR and Woodrow Wilson, so forth, but World War II came along and we revitalized our way out of the economic morass that FDR put us in and expanded upon. But this is a crossroads period of time, or moment in time, where the country can fundamentally change. I mean, it's this close. With this debt, the debt alone that we have rung up has an impingement on liberty and freedom that people instinctively understand. It may be tough to actually put in your hand, but instinctively we all feel this is not how things happen in this country. We don't nationalize one sixth of the economy in healthcare, and it's not been made better. It's going to be made more expensive. There are going to be death panels. This is an utter debacle. It's got to be repealed. It's got to be overturned. The best health care in the world is right here.

RUSH: It's in the process of being destroyed. And at the same time we only have one life and we want to enjoy it. So it's a balancing act. If you take all this stuff seriously, you can get lost in it and not enjoy the one life that we all have. So what I try to do is balance them both, not taking either for granted. Life is a very precious thing. It's a shame we have to get so old to appreciate it, to understand that. It really is. I'm more in awe of just the whole concept of human life with each and every day I get up, realizing how strong it is, how hard it is to snuff out and yet how fragile it is at the same time. And I, folks, my mind continues to expand. I still have room in here.

RUSH: It's beyond me. It really is beyond me how anybody can think all this is an accident or a coincidence. It's beyond me how anybody can look at the human brain and think, "Yeah, Big Bang zillions of years ago led to this." There has to be a reason for all this. I believe that there are questions that we can ask that we'll never have the answers to on this Earth, but that we will get the answers to. My father told me once that...

RUSH: When I was a kid, my father was a biblical scholar. He taught Sunday school. He was immersed in it. And when I was very young I'd ask him questions. And he told me once that the questions I asked forced him outside to try to independently, in his own intellectual way, validate his beliefs. And I guess when I was a young kid, I was having trouble with the concept of heaven and hell. I said, "Why would God create a competitor to whom he could lose, the devil? Daddy, I don't understand this." I'm four or five years old and he's trying to explain this. He took this very seriously. He knows he can't send me off to watch Romper Room. He's got to have an answer for this.

So the one thing I remember him saying, I don't know if it was in answer to that specific question, but I've never forgotten it. He said, "Son, I believe in the loving God of Creation and I believe that a God who creates beings who can conceive of a beautiful heavenly afterlife and can live their lives in such a way as to achieve that place, it would be the ultimate act of cruelty if it isn't true -- the fact that a God would create beings that could ponder these things that don't exist," that's how he told himself above and beyond the Bible that there was heaven. And that's how he explained it to me. And he said I'm the one that caused him to start thinking about things like that. Well, I've always believed that we are going to be able to ask questions to which there aren't any answers to. They are what drive us.

The quest to find out our purpose, our meaning, it's all embodied in how we live our lives and how we want to manage our affairs, and it certainly includes our politics. If it didn't matter, nobody would get as aroused. And a lot of people don't, but enough of us do that we have enough that will get engaged, enough people, a majority of whom will get engaged enough to take on the challenges of the people who do want to fundamentally change this country. I am blessed and grateful to be on the same side of all this as all of you. I thank you all very much for coming out tonight, being in my radio audience, it's a blessing I have each and every day. Thank you so much.

RUSH: "A new ABC News poll states that only half of American citizens still believe in The American Dream. Or, depending on the type of person you are, half of Americans no longer believe in The American Dream. The polls results indicate that when asked, 'Do you think The American Dream -- that if you work hard, you'll get ahead -- still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?' 50% of Americans answered with 'still true,' 43% with 'once true,' and an entire 4% with 'never true.' But the numbers within the numbers are just as revealing. 57% of those who make 75K or more a year said 'still true,' whereas only 46% of those making 25K and under answered similarly. Geography also played a role; 58% of the American West still believe in The American Dream, compared to 46% of those in the so-called rust-belt. The poll also broke down the numbers along racial lines, saying that 57% of whites still believe in the Dream, while only 48% of non-whites agreed. Other revelations from the poll: When asked if they'd rather have Barack Obama or George W. Bush in charge of 'economic policy right now,' 52% reported Obama, and 35% said Bush."

Now, you can look at that any number of ways. I think it's pretty high given how much hatred and negative PR had been drummed up about George Bush. "The poll's final question might be the most damning to those in Washington. 'On another subject, if you had children, would you want your own son or daughter to grow up to be a candidate for U.S. Congress, or would you rather see them pick another line of work?' Only 25% of respondents wished a congressional future for their children." Only 25%. Well, I mean, when such options as heading up the National Organization for Circumcision, Information and Resource Centers exist out there, why would you want to go to Congress? I mean, when you can join the president's commission on Fairness for Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans, why would you want to go to Congress?

Before addressing this, let's go back to June 16th of 2009, a little over a year ago, ABC News, again: "Is the American Dream Dead -- or Just in Hiding? Cutting Back on the Excess of the Boom Years Might Not Be so Bad, Some Families Discover." So here we're in the throes of the Depression and it was one of these stories: "Hey, you know what? Being out of work, why, it's not that bad. It's not that bad a deal. My family, we're getting to know each other a little bit more. We're not so selfish. We're not so obsessed with consuming." Remember all of those stories?

This was a little over a year ago on ABC: "As the recession grinds on, and we take stock of our country's lost jobs, foreclosed homes and decimated 401(k)s, many Americans are lamenting the loss of something that can't be captured in statistics and data points: the American Dream. Commenting on the state of the economy shortly after taking office, President Barack Obama equated the economic downturn with nothing less than 'the American Dream in reverse.' But what exactly is this elusive American Dream that seems to be slipping away? Vanity Fair writer David Kamp notes that the American Dream is not a static concept. The evolution of this idea is reflected in popular television. In the 1950s, Ralph and Alice Kramden lived in a grubby New York tenement on 'The Honeymooners.'

"Just a few years later the American viewing audience could set its sights higher by watching the Cleavers in their modest suburban home on 'Leave it to Beaver.' By the 1970s, 'The Brady Bunch' lived in an even bigger home and could afford a Hawaiian vacation. The families of 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas' played out their decadent dramas in mansions during the 1980s. All of which led inexorably to the spoiled brats of 'Gossip Girl' and 'The Hills.' To many, the American Dream seemed to evolve into something more like a nightmare." Really? "'The boom grossed me out,' said professor Richard Florida of the University of Toronto. 'I mean I just thought it was gauche and horrible and over the top. You know, "Hummerville" and "Conspicuous-Consumptionville." I never liked it.'" Of course not, he's a professor.

"Florida said America is now in the midst of what he calls 'The Great Reset,' a time when our entire way of life will be re-imagined. 'I think many, many Americans felt that they were on this kind of treadmill and couldn't keep up and actually felt empty. You can't just buy yourself into self-worth,' said Florida. During the boom, Holly and Keith Berkley of San Diego, Calif., were definitely on that treadmill. 35-year-old Holly's Internet marketing consulting company was thriving. She was driven, she says, to the extreme." They go on and give these examples of people who really didn't like progressing, who really didn't like advancing. ABC turned over every rock and they went out there and they found every human example of people who did not like the fruits of their labors and working harder. They didn't like the whole concept of a nicer car, larger house.

They didn't like the concept of having to keep up with people who could afford bigger houses and go on vacations. They wanted an excuse to settle in to have nothing. And the recession gave them the perfect opportunity to settle in and feel guiltless over being lazy and having nothing because when everybody had nothing, then it was okay to have nothing. When everybody was perceived to be hurting, it was okay to be lazy and lackadaisical. So then you might ask yourself, "Well, if it became comfortable during the Obama years to sit there with no advancement, to not be on that treadmill, to not feel any pressure to get better to improve yourself, then why resent people who still do it? Why resent those who still do it?"

Snerdley, did your father talk to you about the American Dream? Your parents, did they talk to you about the American Dream at all? You lived it. You lived the American Dream, but it was always important to do better, it was always important. Yeah, I think back, my dad was obsessed with my going to college for one reason. That was the only way to improve myself. My dad was not comfortable with me stagnating, and he thought stagnating was bad. You know, why wind up in the basement? He wanted me out of the house as soon as I could get out of the house. I accommodated.

This whole notion of the American Dream's dead, only 50% of the American people think it's worth striving for or it's even possible, I think that my parents, they didn't verbalize the concept of the American Dream but they damn well wanted us to live it. I mean, we were never sat down, "Son, I want to tell you about the American Dream." But I'll tell you what my dad did do, my parents. They extolled the virtues of this country. Why do I care about it so much? My parents did. We were told we could be the best. We were told we could be anything. In fact, we were expected to be. I don't know about you, but in our family we were expected to make something of ourselves. We were expected to matter. We were expected to do better than our parents did. It was not issued in such challenging language but that was their purpose of being parents, to see to it that we had the best and that we were able to provide the best for ourselves.

So where did all this talk start that, "Yeah, it's fun to get off the treadmill. You know, I didn't like the pressure. I didn't like having to go out and work every day and measure myself against the Joneses and try to keep up with these metrosexuals who are getting pedicures and manicures and having their hair done and driving their Beemers. I didn't like that at all. I'm content to sit home with my wife who doesn't do anything either and we'll sit here and we'll just count our lucky stars that we're average." When did this set in? I'll tell you when this set in. It has always been the objective of the American left to wipe out success. It's always been the objective of the American left to wipe out people who do better than others because that's intrinsically in their view unfair. It's simply not fair that somebody should have any more than anybody else, no matter how they get it, unless you're a Kennedy. If you inherit it, you are a Democrat, fine and dandy, you can have it. But it's simply unjust and immoral. It's what animates, motivates, and inspires Obama to this day.

So we come to a year later, ABC: "Poll: Only Half of Americans Believe In 'The American Dream.'" Let me ask you a question: How many of you in this audience...? How many of your parents were like mine? And how many of you as parents today are like your parents? How many of you have great expectations for your kids and hopes for them? How many of you have chucked it, though? How many of you have tossed in the towel and said, "You know what? America's finished. America's best days are behind you"? How many of you are doing this? I think when you get a poll -- and we'll just, for the sake of this discussion, grant that the poll is accurate. For the sake of this discussion, because you know how I feel about polls.

You can get whatever result you want in them. But to the extent that half the people of the country think the American dream is dead, that means half the American people are being told it's dead. That means -- and this is very sad. It means that way too many people are not being reminded by leaders of the greatness of this country. Thomas Sowell. Where is this? He has a great, great quote. Let me see if I can paraphrase it. Well, I'm going to botch it if I paraphrase it. But it's essentially how much ahead of the game you are being born in America and what a crime it is that so many people in this country do not understand that. Our leaders today -- and by that I mean the Democrat Party, the American left from Obama on down -- do nothing but attack the American people.

They beat us up every day. We get nothing but criticism from this administration and from the Democrat Party. We're greedy, selfish. We consume too much energy. We have more than our fair share of everything from salt to food to trans-fats. We drive the wrong cars, we use the wrong kind of light bulbs, we don't pay enough in taxes, we use too much healthcare. The people who lead this country are dumping on us, the achievers in this country, each and every day -- and blaming us, blaming you, blaming the achievers for all the problems not only in this country but in the world. So it's totally understandable to me, but unacceptable, that half the people in this country think the American dream is dead when we don't have political leaders extolling the whole concept of American exceptionalism anymore.

You know what I remember about the '80s and the Reagan years? There's one thing that stands out. Everybody... You who weren't alive or who are too young don't realize the misery of the late Seventies. I mean, it was as bad as it is today. It was horrible. Add gasoline lines, add all kinds of skyrocketing energy prices to everything else that was going on, to the incompetence of a peanut farmer in the White House. I mean, it was... There was a misery index to describe it! Even our own president described the country as being in a malaise. It was bad. And there were people talking about the end of America's salad days even then. Then Reagan got elected and there was immediately, even in the midst of a recession, the '81-'82 recession, an immediate transformation. People all of a sudden were up and happy and were saying, "You know what?

"We've got to go through this. This is a much needed corrective measure, this economic mess that we're in. Because a bunch of stuff has been going on that was fraudulent and phony; this connection has to happen." And I remember, maybe it was... I don't remember where it was, some television show. I don't even remember who it was. But some people were analyzing, "Well, what has Reagan done for the country?" I mean, the tax cuts had happened but they really hadn't kicked in. The Reagan economic boom was just beginning but it hadn't started. "What has Reagan done?" And the very simple answer: "He's made people feel good about the country again." Ronald Reagan made people feel good about their country again, made them proud to feel Americans. Is Obama making you proud to feel American? Is anybody in the Democratic Party making you proud of being an American? No! They're blaming you!

You're destroying the climate. You're destroying the polar bear habitat. You are doing this, you're doing that. You're eating too much! You're too fat! You're driving the wrong kind of car. You don't care enough about the disadvantaged. You're a racist, you're a sexist, you're a bigot and you're a homophobe -- and half the people who hear this happen to agree with it. Half the people are already down on themselves anyway and so when Obama says, "We're no longer going to be a country that leads the world economically," people say, "Thank God. Now I don't have to work hard." So to the extent that we have economic stagnation in this country, it's not just because of the destructive policies of this regime. It's because of their attitudes. It is their purpose. They are seeking to create this defeatist attitude.

And the Democrats hated Reagan: "Oh, yeah. Reagan sees everything through rose-colored glasses. What Reagan sees is unreal. That's not an America that can exist anymore."

RUSH: Here's the Sowell quote. Here's the Tom Sowell quote: "When you consider what an enormous windfall gain it is to be born in America, it is painful to hear some people complain bitterly that someone else got a bigger windfall gain than they did." You're already ahead of the game when you're born here and to start complaining, B-I-itching about people who have more than you is sickening, when you could be that person tomorrow if you wanted to be in this country.

To the phones to Los Angeles. Scott, thank you for waiting. I appreciate your patience. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Good. Hey, with those businesses sitting on the money that the government or the left keeps talking about. Now, if the company makes the money and then goes and spends it, wouldn't they be spending it to make more money, which is the evil that they've pointed out that these corporations do is they try to make more money for themselves? I've made money, it's in my company, and I don't want to spend it. I could. I want to spend it because I could either make more money or not with it. Right now, I need a customer. I don't need a loan and I don't need somebody upset at me for making this money. The idea of making money is I need a customer to buy the products that I'm selling.

CALLER: When I make money, I pay the employees and all my bills, and if I see more customers and I decide to grow.

CALLER: I'm not. I just, like... Well, what would I do with it? I don't have any customers to expand.

RUSH: No, no, this is the point. You are exactly right. Let me put this in context. It is Democrats complaining about all the cash that businesses large and small are sitting on. They cite Apple. You know, Apple's sitting on $45 million or billion, whatever it is, in cash. They are sitting on it. Why? The Democrats want you to believe it's somehow unfair that these are greedy people hoarding that money and buying themselves jets with it, which is silly. A corporation holding onto money is different than an individual holding onto money. There are a lot of people who believe right now that cash is the safest place to be if you've got some, rather than invest it in something, simply because you don't know what the future holds given who's running the country. And if you have the cash, the objective is preservation of principal right now. The objective is not losing it, and even if you put it in a bank where you get 1 or 2% interest, you're at least not losing it. And people's attitudes, right now is, "I'm not going to lose this," and they don't want to invest it because they don't know how much of it is going to be wasted investing it given what policies await them.

RUSH: Let's move on to Victor Davis Hanson because it dovetails here with "Is the American Dream Over?" from ABC. "A Nation of Peasants? The U.S. has Returned to Deriding 'Trickle-Down' Economics ... America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier. ... Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited amount of good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft; they must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy, rather than admiration of success, reigns," in a peasant society. Envy, jealousy rather than admiration. "In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner -- if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government -- would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off.

"Citizens of ancient Greece and Italy soon proved more prosperous and free than either the tribal folk to the north and west or the imperial subjects to the south and east. The success of later Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is a testament to this legacy of the freedom of the individual in the widest political and economic sense. We seem to be forgetting that lately -- though Mao Zedong's redistributive failures in China, or present-day bankrupt Greece, should warn us about what happens when government tries to enforce an equality of result rather than equality of opportunity. Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama's 'spread the wealth' slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama's 'I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.'

"The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses, and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and imposes additional regulations, the more those who create wealth are deciding to sit out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks, since they will likely either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit confiscated through higher taxes." And thus we have the explanation of why individuals and businesses are holding onto their cash, not spending it, not investing it. It's very simple. They see nothing but a country that wants to take it from them.

"Traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks," i.e., invest, be entrepreneurial, "since they will likely either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit confiscated through higher taxes," or see much of their profit confiscated. "No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few won't get richer," hence the peasant society. We're all getting poorer in hopes that a few won't get richer.

"The public is seldom told that 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 40 percent of the income taxes collected, while 40 percent of income earners are exempt from federal income tax -- or that present entitlements like Medicare and Social Security are financially unsustainable. Instead, they hear more often that those who manage to make above $250,000 per year have obligations to the rest of us to give back about 60 percent of what they earn in higher health-care and income taxes -- together with payroll and rising state income taxes, and along with increased capital-gains and inheritance taxes. That limited-good mindset expects that businesses will agree that they now make enough money and so have no need to pursue any more profits at the expense of others. Therefore, they will gladly still hire the unemployed and buy new equipment -- as they pay higher health-care or income taxes." We expect all this. This is traditional Democrat thinking. We're going to punish the hell out of you and expect you to still behave the same. We're going to spank you and we're going to beat you, we're going to rob you, we're going to take everything you've got. We still expect you to run your business so that we can keep stealing from you.

"This peasant approach to commerce also assumes that businesses either cannot understand administration signals or can do nothing about them. So who cares that in the Chrysler bankruptcy settlement, the government quite arbitrarily put the unions in front of the legally entitled lenders? Health insurers should not mind that Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius just warned them to keep their profits down and their mouths shut -- or face exclusion from health-care markets. I suppose that no corporation should worry that the government arbitrarily announced -- without benefit of a law or court ruling -- that it wanted BP to put up $20 billion in cleanup costs for the Gulf spill. What optimistic Americans used to call a rising tide that lifts all boats is now once again derided as trickle-down economics. In other words, a newly peasant-minded America is willing to become collectively poorer so that some will not become wealthier. The present economy suggests that it is surely getting its wish." Peasant economy.

What Victor Davis Hanson is suggesting here is that class envy politics has succeeded. He is suggesting that the American people have decided they're going to be happy not by having their own lives improved, but by seeing somebody else's get punished. He's suggesting that enough Americans have finally arrived to the point to where they don't give a rat's rear end if they earn another dollar just so long as the people who have more than they do lose it. He is suggesting that Americans' happiness is now based on others experiencing misery because that leads to equality. And then it's no wonder, if that's the case, businesses aren't going to expand and hire anybody. Why would they? And it's no wonder that half the American people think the American dream is dead. The optimist in me would say don't worry because the stuff that liberal socialists stick us with will never trickle down. Solids don't trickle.

RUSH: Don in Punta Gorda, Florida, great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: I recently moved from Connecticut to Florida in pursuit of work, and after having no luck, I went back to college to complete my degree in business management. With Obama's policies and agenda, I'm losing faith extremely in the chance of getting a decent job at all, and I'm college-educated, I'm hard working. I would love an opportunity, but I fear if conservatives do not take over the House or Senate -- or hopefully both of them -- that the traditional American goals will slip away. I feel the liberal agenda is crippling, and my biggest fear is that my generation is losing faith, considering a large government as possibly the only solution since things are going so badly. I keep trying to convince my friends to vote and register to vote, but the most common thing I get back from them is, "Obama needs more time, blah, blah-blah, blah, blah," and --

RUSH: Wait, let me stop you. I want to make sure I heard you correctly. You say that a lot of your generation is losing faith and beginning to think that a large government is possibly the only solution to, say, unemployment?

CALLER: Right. Personally I don't understand it at all. But they're college graduated and looking for jobs for two or three years and they are currently working at McDonald's --

RUSH: Did you ever tell them the problem might be Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi? Did you ever tell them the problem might be Democrats?

RUSH: I'm not yelling at you, but did you ever tell them the problem might be themselves?

RUSH: -- that they're using as a crutch that they went to college? "I got a degree." Have they ever stopped to consider maybe they were lied to, that getting a degree was automatically going to get them a $300,000 house and a $250,000 car? Did you ever tell them to consider maybe they've been lied to by everybody?

RUSH: And it's not just handed to them? Did you ever tell them to think maybe they are actually going to have to do some work and that flipping burgers as a first job, there's nothing wrong with that. It gets you into the market. You learn how things work? Did you ever stop to think that maybe they are not going to let you make any money when you're 35 or 40? Did you ever stop to tell them maybe this is natural?

CALLER: Oh, absolutely. This infuriates me totally but I just try to explain this to them and I'm just looking to maybe invite you to tell them that, look, you've got to relax and you've got to vote and you've got to make a change if you are not happy with what you're going.

RUSH: I would love to talk to these dunderheads! You know, I'm all for great expectations. I'm all for having high expectations -- of yourself. I'm all for expecting great things of yourself, but these people need to be talked to if they think there's magic at the end of a college degree.

RUSH: The only place in the world where "success" comes before "work" is the dictionary. It's the only place where success before work, unless you don't need work; you inherit it, but that's not most people. (interruption) The kid probably thinks that I'm mad at him? No, I'm not mad at the caller. I'm not mad at the young man. I just... I'm sorry. There are parts of me today that are on edge. I don't know if you've been able to tell, but some of these things, it doesn't take much to ring my bell, to light my fire. And when I (sobbing), "I have a college degree, I don't have a job and..." I don't have a college degree, either! And I have a job! I started working years before I got my college degree. I'm not putting down college degrees. Don't misunderstand, but they're not a ticket. We've been told that.

You know what? Part of this is all this talk about education all these years: "We need educational opportunities! Education this, education that. We're not spending enough money on education. Education here, education there. Student loan here and there." It's gotten to a point that people get a college degree and education and the world just opens doors. "Please come save us," the rest of the world says to college graduates, and how demeaning it must be to have to start out flipping burgers in McDonald's or something because you went to college. Well, you who are just graduating from college, get in line. There's 10% of the workforce ahead of you that's unemployed because of Democrats and because of President Obama. There are people 35 and 40 years of age who have lost their jobs, who also went to college, and they're out there competing and they already have families and they're trying to get work, too.

Nobody is owed anything. The country doesn't owe you anything because you're an American or especially because you have a college degree. Now, if you think... If you are a college student and you've got a degree and you're out there and you can't find a job and if you think -- if you agree with Obama that the Bush tax cuts ought to sunset -- $700 billion ought to be taken out of the private sector and sent to Obama, then you deserve to be out of work for the rest of your life because that $700 billion taken out of the private sector could be used to grow businesses and hire people. If you support Obama in raising taxes on everybody, taking money out of the private sector and giving it to unions and giving it to government workers and giving it to himself and to ACORN, you deserve to be unemployed.

If you voted for Obama, you deserve to be unemployed. If you voted for Obama, you deserve to be in misery because that's what he has in mind for every one of us. You're out there thinking Obama was going to give you a new kitchen, a new car, a new house, pay off your student loan and you have to go flip burgers -- maybe Burger King instead of McDonald's, I don't know; maybe working at a Taco Bell -- you deserve it! Until you start voting the right way, including voting for yourself, you deserve to suffer the consequences of your actions. If you're going to vote for a bunch of socialists who believe all money needs to reside in the state and they decide who gets what and they decide when you get a job, then live with it.

A college degree got Larry Summers a job. In college. You know, there's a fine line these days between education and subsidized ignorance. It's a very, very fine line. Now, I have nothing against college, but I'm going to tell you something. The one area of life that's getting expensive out the wazoo and nobody ever criticizes it is tuition, right? Tuition, every year, goes up. Do you ever hear Democrats complain about it like the cost of a cancer drug or the cost of oil or the cost of a stamp or the cost of anything else? No, no. The cost of Walmart? No! But college tuition? Nobody ever complains about tuition costs going up and up and up. Nobody complains about the student loan rate. No, nobody complains about that. Why, I wonder why that is. Are we getting our bang for the buck? Are you paying for a college degree if you're a kid? Are you getting your bang for the buck? College is fine for some people but it's not an elixir. It's not a guarantee.

So you get a college degree. Let's say you major in... (sigh) What's your average? I'm even stunned at some of the majors you can get in college these days. Like you can major in the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat, major in leisure studies, uh... Okay, get a journalism major. Okay, education major, journalism major. Right. Philosophy major, right. Archeology major. I don't know, whatever it is. Major in ballroom dance, of course. It doesn't replace work. How about a major in film studies? How about a major in black studies? How about a major in women studies? How about a major in home ec? Oops, sorry! No such thing. The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies makes free men out of the children of the regime. EIB is the great emancipator of the mind. Now, you might be hearing me as a typical fuddy-duddy parent here from the old days. "Well, that may have been how it was for you, Limbaugh. You had to go to work to get somewhere in the world, but it ain't the way it is these days." Well, it's never going to change, and it isn't fuddy-duddyism.

Now, $7700 for a drug. Okay, we've got a disease called cancer. It's incurable. We have been working since the creation of time to try to figure it out, create drugs to arrest it, to cure it, to stop it, but there isn't any. We've gotten close. Tremendous progress is being made in all kinds of illnesses in drugs, cancers to extend life expectancy, quality of life and so forth. But a pure unadulterated cure is not there. Nevertheless, companies are investing in this because this is what they do. Everybody is searching for the answer to everything. So Roche happens to come up with this drug called Avastin that cost them an arm and a leg in research and development. Regulatory, too. Just dealing with the government to move every step of the way along the process here is expensive.

At some point, once the drug is approved, they have to be able to make back what it cost them or there's no reason to stay in business. Roche is not in business so that you may live. You may live because Roche is in business, but that's not why they started up. (interruption) What's wrong with that, Snerdley? No, Roche is not in business so that you live. McDonald's is not in business so that you don't starve. General Motors is not in business so that you don't have to walk. Roche has to pay for the drugs they tried to bring to market that didn't make the cut, that didn't work. We're not talking about curing a hangnail or coagulating blood or the equivalent of stitching up a cut here. We're talking about a drug that might extend a breast cancer life by five months. We ought to expect that that's going to cost money.

But in our peasant society, it has now been assumed that if one person can't have it, nobody should have it. I know this is a tough one to combat. "Why should only the rich be able to have the drugs that could extend their lives?" Well, it's not just the rich that do. Nobody talks about the charitable donations that Roche makes of the drug and nobody talks about all the medical foundations that buy the drug and make it available for people at less cost because of the charitable nature of the American people. But what we do know is that we have a government led by a bunch of people who want to make you think that everybody trying to improve your life is your enemy -- be it Roche, be it BP, be it Big Oil, be it "Big" whatever. For me I'm simply fed up with dealing with a political bunch of people who want to tell me that the people who improve our lives and our standard of living is our enemy.

I'm tired of their enemies list. Nobody alive ever gets everything they want. I don't know, I'm guessing but I'll bet you there are some people who have an allergy that if they could afford Avastin can't take it. I'm just guessing, but I think I'm on pretty firm ground when I say that there's not one person alive, not even David Rockefeller, who gets everything he wants because someday he's going to die and I'm sure he doesn't want to. I know Sinatra didn't want to die, but he did. We're all going to, including the polar bears. They're going to die, too, no matter what we do. (interruption) Dawn is saying, "You don't have to bring them into it, you're really sounding mean." No, I'm just trying to... (sigh) Sometimes being realistic sounds, I just -- I told the people in Philadelphia last night: As I get older, I am more and more in awe of humanity and life and all that is, and I also become less and less able to suffer fools. (interruption)

No, I'm not becoming a grumpy old man! I'm an inspiring old man. I submit to you that what I'm

saying today is inspiring to people. Sadly, a lot of people are hearing this and saying, "Why, I never thought of that before." Yeah. Well, that's why you're here. We expand mental horizons here. So to take it back to the beginning. If you're just out of college and you've got a degree, I don't care what it's in, and you can't find work, well, join the crowd. There's about 10 to 15% of the workforce that can't, either. And they may have already had jobs. They got college degrees years before you did and they're trying to find jobs, too. So you have a lot of competition. And maybe, maybe if you have to take... I mean, my first job -- you know, this is going to sound old fuddy-duddy. My first job I shined shoes in a barber shop. I made $50 in three months. Now, granted I was 13 and lived at home, but I wanted to do it. I always wanted to work. I hated being stuck at home doing the student thing. I always wanted to work. And there's nothing wrong with it. So you can take what you can get. And, you know, this, "Well, that's beneath me. I have a degree." Put it aside for a while because reality is what it is. There are a lot of people having to do a lot of things that they think are beneath them right now because McDonald's is not open to make sure you don't starve. That's your job. Your responsibility to make sure you don't starve and your kids don't starve and all the rest of it.

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

The anti-Jihad resistence (which appears to be a set of links to similar websites):

Mostly a liberal blogger, who says vicious things about most conservatives; and yet, says something sensible, e.g. posting many of the things which the healthcare bill does to us.

News Organization (I mention them because I have seen 2 honest stories on their website, which shocked and surprised me):

Even though this group leans left, if you need to know what happened each day, and you are a busy person, here is where you can find the day’s news given in 100 seconds:

Weatherman Underground 1969 “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Janine Turner’s website (I’m serious; and the website is serious too). This is if you have an interest in real American history:

Judith Miller is one of the moderate and fairly level-headed voices for FoxNews:

This is an odd blog; conservativism, bikinis and whatever else posted by either a P.I. or the brother of a P.I.:

Info Wars, because there is a war on for your mind (this site may be a little crazy??):

The Magic Negro Watch (this is peppered with obscenities and angry conservative rhetoric):

Do you want to watch what is happening on our border? These are actual videos of observations cams along the border:

No matter what your political stripe, you will like this; evaluate your Congressman or Senator on the issues:

AC/DC economics (start with the oldest lessons first; economics in 60 second bites):

The Freedom Project (most a conservative news and opinion site which appears to concentrate on matters financial)

This appears to be a daily pork report, apparently as pork in Washington bills is discovered, it gets posted at Tom Coburg’s website:

Weekly poll, asking you to identify what we ought to cut in governmental spending:

This is an interesting site; it seems to be devoted to the debate of climate change:

This is indispensable: the Wall Street Journal’s guide to Obama-care (all of their pertinent articles arranged by date—send one a day to your liberal friends):

Obamacare class action suit (as of today, joining in on the suit costs you whatever you want to donate, if I understand the form correctly):

A Muslim apologetic site (they will write out letters to express your feelings, and all you have to do is sign them, and they will send them on):

Since this will be with us for a long time, the timeline of the BP gulf oil spill:

This is cool: a continuous timeline of the spill, with the daily info and the expansion of the oil, and the response:

Army Ranger Michael Behenna sentenced to 25 years in prison for 25 years for shooting Al Qaeda operative

Maybe the White House does not need to hold press conferences? It releases exclusive articles daily right here:

This is quite helpful; it is a list of all leftist groups, with links to background information on each of these groups (when I checked, 879 groups were listed). This is a fantastic resource.

In case you need to reference this, here are the photos of all those on the JournoList:

Are you tired of all the unfocused news and lame talking heads yelling at one another? Just grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and see what is really going on in the world:

Conservative New Media (it is so-so; I must admit to getting tired of seeing the interviewer high-fiving Carly Fiorina 3 or 4 times during an interview):

One of the more radical people from the right, calling for the impeachment of Obama:

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a free enterprise site (there are several videos on the flat tax):

This is a pretty radical site which alleges that Obama is a Marxist hell-bent in taking over our country:

1982 interview with Larry Grathwohl on Ayers' plan for American re-education camps and the need to kill millions

This is a news site which I just discovered; they gave 3 minute coverage to Obama’s healthcare summit and seemed to give a pretty decent overall view of it, without slanting one way or the other:

I have glanced through their website and it seems to be quite professional and reasonable. They have apparently been around since 1942.

This is fantastic; Florida (the Sunshine State) is now putting its state budget online:

Suzanne Somers s supposed to be older than Bill O’Reilly? He interviewed her this week, and she looked, well, hot. She is big into vitamins and human growth hormones.

The National Journal, which is a political journal (which, at first glance, seems to be pretty even-handed):

And I am hoping that most people see this as non-partisan: Citizens Against Government Waste:

This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.

This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:

Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:

On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.

We watch FOX so you don't have to). Be clear on this; they do not want you to watch FoxNews.

Conservative Review
Issue #145	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	September 26, 2010