Rush Limbaugh Live Thread Monday 10-16-06

(Fortune Magazine) -- If the recent plunge in gas prices is the result of a conspiracy by President George W. Bush to help the Republicans retain control of Congress, as 42 percent of Americans believe, according to one Gallup poll, a lot of Wall Streeters wish they'd been in on the plot.

So what really drove prices down - if not an Oliver Stone-worthy scenario involving the Commander-in-Chief, the House of Saud and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson cajoling his cronies at Goldman Sachs to sink the crude market?

By late summer, hedge funds and other investors had poured billions into long positions in oil, gasoline, natural gas and the rest of what traders call the "energy complex," all betting on a replay of the severe 2005 hurricane season that sent prices soaring in the wake of Katrina and Rita. But one day after oil reached a monthly high of $76.98 a barrel on Aug. 7, government meteorologists downgraded their hurricane forecast and cautioned that a repeat of 2005 was "unlikely."

That announcement, combined with the end of the summer driving season and a recalibration of the Goldman Sachs (Charts) commodity index that reduced the weighting of gasoline, prompted speculators to head for the exits even faster than they'd piled in.

The switch in Goldman's basket of commodities had been previously announced by the firm, but that didn't stop the conspiracy theorists.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1719441/posts

Rush Limbaugh: Don't Be Guilty Over American Greatness
RushLimbaugh.com ^ | 10/13/06 | Rush Limbaugh

Posted on 10/14/2006 2:16:36 PM CDT by wagglebee

RUSH: Mike in Lake Tahoe, California -- or Nevada. Which side are you on?

CALLER: South Lake Tahoe.

RUSH: South Lake Tahoe. It's great to have you.

CALLER: Yeah, thank you, sir. You know, I understand fully the rules of engagement on Open Line Friday, and, quite frankly, I know it's my job to make you look better as the host.

RUSH: Well, no, no, no. Not on Friday. That's out the window, because if you talk about something I don't care about, it's hard for me to look good. So...

CALLER: The underpinning, the underpinning. But I mean along that line of making you look good, sir, you've been hitting on all 12 this week. It's been phenomenal.

RUSH: Thank you. I appreciate that, thank you.

CALLER: Especially that gal whose father or whatever never told her she could amount to something, you know, kind of choked me up as a dad, so I tip my hat to you.

RUSH: You know, speaking of that, I got a thank-you note from her, and she included a picture. Her 30th birthday, I think, is yesterday or today, and she was just as nice as she could be in the e-mail -- and that guy, by the way, that we sent a computer to should get it today if he hasn't already.

CALLER: Wow. Well, you know, my question to the screener was, you know, we hear all the time that we as Americans consume 80% of the world's natural resources. So my question is: Well, how much wealth do we generate in the world? You know, what's the figure on that?

RUSH: Well, it's profound. This is an argument, by the way, Mike -- and he's talking about a story, we did it earlier this week, that 300 million Americans will happen soon. We're going to reach the 300 million mark in population. Nobody knows quite exactly when. All we know is where it'll happen and that is at the southern border, probably in California or Mexico or maybe Texas. That's where we'll reach 300 million people, and this story went on to say, (doing lib impression) "This is just not fair. America can't sustain this on its own. It has to steal and rob and plunder resources from around the world, ensuring that the Third World forever stays poor, and America is just 5% of the world's population and uses 25% of the world's resources. That's why they're so responsible for global warming and destruction of the planet," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I've been hearing this for 20 years. I don't know if it was Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb in the seventies that got this line of thinking started, but if not it was right around then, and just with simple observation, it is absurd. We feed the planet, we repair the planet, we have liberated over a billion oppressed people. We rebuilt Europe after World War II, after it was destroyed by a European, a German by the name of Adolf Hitler. We are single-handedly responsible for helping people after the tsunami.

Earthquakes and disasters around the world. We are first on the scene. We have, with our space program, starting in the sixties -- people forget this, but the inventions that were necessary to make space flight possible found their way into daily life once the products and systems became affordable, and the lifestyle, the standard of living for the world has improved dramatically as a result. You can just take a look at what happened in the twentieth century alone. My grandfather was born in the 1890s, and in the 1890s they barely had electricity.

There was hardly any phones. I mean, the phones were just weird. Everybody got around on horse and buggy or train. In the 104 years that my grandfather lived, he saw the most incredible growth. He saw the most technical human progress. He saw life expectancy expand, all because of the freedom to produce in this country, the freedom to invent, entrepreneurial freedom, scientific freedom, you name it. He saw the invention of the airplane, the invention of the automobile. He saw the practical, common use for everybody of the telephone. He saw space flight.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now let's look at this resources business from another angle, ladies and gentlemen. Sad-sack, laden-with-guilt, miserably unhappy useful idiot liberals love to run around and say, "We're destroying the planet! We are so selfish, Mr. Limbaugh. We are so greedy." The new castrati, ladies and gentlemen, victims of the feminized culture in western societies. "Mr. Limbaugh, we are so greedy because we just have no concern for others. It's all about us, ourselves, so we steal all the resources from the rest of the world. We steal oranges and we steal fruit. We even steal coffee from Brazil. We steal everything. It's horrible."

Right. Okay. Now, according to these liberals, one of the most damaging resources out there, of course, created by God-d is oil. I mean, that stuff, rotten, that stuff. That's a killer. It's deadly. It's right up there with tobacco. All right, so we are blamed for stealing the resources of the world. Well, being only 5% of the world's population and using 25%. Let's just apply that in oil. We do import over half of our oil. We don't steal it, we pay for it. The people who sell it love to sell it. Look at who they are, by the way. You want to talk about the big trick that God's played on the good guys, all the bad guys in the world have the oil. What's God thinking?

Hugo Chavez, the Middle East sheiks. Let's talk about them for a second. OPEC. Oh, they love selling oil for as high a price per barrel as they can, and we buy it because we need it, we are a growing, expanding economy. Oil is the fuel of the engine of capitalism and freedom and democracy. We pay them for it. Now, is it our fault that they use the money to build themselves three million square foot palaces, go out and buy fleets of 747s, fly off to the Bahamas or wherever to pretend that they're not Muslims, and don't do diddly-squat for their own people? Is it our fault? We are spreading the wealth, gang. We are enabling some of these dirt-poor, otherwise Third World countries to have roaringly wealthy societies themselves. But how come it doesn't happen? Is that our fault?

Is it our fault that your average Middle Easterner lives a Third World life from the Seventh Century? It's not that we're stealing anything. We're using it. If we weren't buying it, somebody would, the ChiComs or whoever else. I think people have this distorted view, and it is rooted in guilt, a hundred percent rooted in guilt over our affluence. I was talking about the things my grandfather saw as a human from the time he was born 'til he died. The advancements in standards of living, lifestyles, the human condition, were incomprehensible. Do you realize the advances that we in America, and thus shared with the world, made in the Twentieth Century alone outpaced the previous thousand years?

You could take all the human advancement, from phones, electricity, I'm just talking the basics here. Phones, electricity, air travel, jet travel then, supersonic travel for a while, space flight, space exploration, satellites, do you know what they enable you to do in your ordinary everyday life? You may not even know. But I'm telling you, the thousand years previous saw a smidgen of that kind of advancement in the human condition. Medicine, health. It's incomparable what happened -- and where did it start? Right here: the United States of America. Now, I realize some of the western European cultures had great contributions, and I'm not diminishing them. Art, dining, cooking, architecture. Really, I'm not putting this all down, but they still haven't caught up with basic plumbing.

I hate to say it. You ever try to use one of their phone systems over there, it's still a pain -- you're better off taking a world cell phone, a GSM cell phone than trying to use a hotel phone over there in Europe. And try getting in a car over there that's larger than a lawn mower. I'm sorry, folks. "But, Rush! But, Rush! Petrol over there costs so much and the streets are so narrow." That's not our problem. Just because we choose to build streets that are wider than a little Peugot is not our fault. I have no patience for these people who want to whine and moan about prosperity and claim it's a sin or that we are somehow denying others. The world is not a zero-sum game. No economic model is a zero-sum game. The left believes that in the economic pie, if somebody takes a piece out of it, that the pie has thus gotten smaller.

Likewise, they believe if somebody gets fired, a job is lost. When taxes are cut, they think revenue depletes. They do not understand that this is not a zero-sum game, and you can look at the federal budget every year, and you can look at the gross domestic product of the country every year and understand that there are people fired every year and people taking big, big chunks out of the pie. I mean, the Forbes 400 now is all billionaires, and yet the GDP of the country keeps going, the middle class keeps expanding. Wealth keeps expanding. How is this possible if life is a zero-sum game? This is why you cannot listen to the tripe and the gloom and doom and the apocalyptic predictions and the overall just flat out miserable nature of liberal Democrats. It will destroy you, it will depress you, make you wonder why you're getting up in the morning, what's the point? I mean, they're already asking themselves that, and don't join them.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.