RUSH: Audio sound bite time, Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, was on KTVA channel 11 last night responding to Democrats drilling in ANWR.
RUSH: Amen! Here is a female Republican who is willing to gut it up. She sent Dingy Harry a letter. She challenged the Democrats to drill in ANWR. ‘What’s your plan?’ If we’re not going to drill offshore and we’re not going to drill in ANWR, what is your plan for more energy? And here was Obama in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was at a campaign event. Here’s Obama pretty much responding to Sarah Palin, whether he knew it or not.
OBAMA: We’re not going to bring down gas prices easily, quickly. The only way to do it is to reduce demand, uh, over the long term in a serious way. And so, you know, I — I — I — when John McCain says, well, we’re going to drill our way out of the problem, or we’re going to give tax cuts, uh, uh, hol — or suspend the gas tax for 60 days which would save you 30 cents a day for 90 days for a grand total of $28, you know, then I say, you know, that’s a gimmick. You’re not being serious.
RUSH: I just can’t take this man seriously, folks. I’m sorry. I listen and I want to laugh. Here’s a guy who thinks you’re paying too much for everything except gasoline. You’re paying too much for health care. You’re paying too much for tuition. You’re paying too much for education. You’re paying too much for this, too much for that. But not gasoline. Whatever amount that the gallon of gasoline might be reduced, it’s insignificant. It’s a gimmick. It’s a trick. Yet these are the people supposedly concerned with the dire economic consequences brought on by the Republicans. We’re not going to bring down gas prices easily, quickly? We’re not? We’re not even going to try? The only way to do it is to reduce demand over the long term?
No, it’s not. You can conservative out the wazoo, Senator, and you’re not going to produce any more. This is pathetic. We cannot afford this guy — I mean financially. Forget all the other ways. We just can’t afford him. The average American could not afford to pay for a Barack Obama presidency. It’s just no more complicated than that. Now another one of the wizards of smart. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, was on Scarborough’s show today, the cohost Willie Geist interviewed Friedman, said, ‘What’s the direction? I mean, we’ve heard so much about offshore drilling, all these short-term solution, where should we be headed as a country, [wizard of smart]? What’s the bottom line on all of this?’
FRIEDMAN: It’s a policy that first of all starts with incentives for what I call radical ‘innovation,’ that’s gonna give us abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. For that, you need really the market signals — gasoline tax, carbon tax — that will stimulate a hundred thousand-man patent projects in a hundred thousand garages. Second thing you need is dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. That’s standards for refrigerators and lightbulbs and mileage standards so we don’t need so many electrons. And third, you’re going to need conservation. How about going back to driving 55 miles an hour? You can save millions of gallons just there.
RUSH: Well, that’s it. The wizard of smart, Thomas Friedman, wants to roll back our advancement, roll back our lifestyle and give us abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. Yeah. For those of you… ‘You really need the market signals, gas tax, carbon tax, that will stimulate a hundred thousand man patent per check. He projects in a hundred thousand garages.’ You know, it’s not electrons. It’s not electrons that we need to be working on. It’s neutrinos. If we could isolate and find neutrinos, put ’em in the accelerator, and find a way to harness their interaction with protons and neutrons, the neutrino could unlock every secret we have. Do you hear any research on neutrinos? The only people using neutrinos are people that are trying to manufacture plutonium, on their own.
You’ve gotta do it deep underground. But neutrinos? He’s talking about electrons. Electrons are old hat. That’s like trying to mess around with the atom. We already figured that out. Neutrinos! Neutrinos are the future. But besides all that, this is lame. This is lame lunacy. Roll it back to 55? All these people on the left want you to sacrifice your family’s future, your growth opportunity, prosperity, and opportunity. We are a nation in a constant state of decline, as they look at it. By the way, you think these people are going to follow suit on any of this? You think they are? I mean, if we go 55, Friedman might have to drive 55, but other than that, do you think they’re going to go sacrificing like they want you to? Heh-heh-heh. No way.
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RUSH: Hey grab audio sound bite eight. The wizard of smart from the New York Times, the op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, who is asked by Willie Geist on MSNBC, where, Thomas, all-knowing wizard Thomas, where should we be headed as a country? What is the bottom line on all this, Thomas? Please share with us your wisdom.
RUSH: All right, we all heard that together mere moments ago here on the EIB Network, and it got me to thinking. He may be right about one thing, and that is conservation. Why don’t we just establish as a national policy now that we’re going to end the hard copy, the actual paper, the dead tree editions of the New York Times and all other large circulation newspapers in America? Imagine how many electrons, Thomas, we could save. Imagine how much carbon we could save? Not just the trees that we would save, but how about all of the expense, Thomas, involved in transporting all these newspapers that are obsolete anyway now thanks to the Internet. If people want to buy a newspaper, let them actually pay ten to $15 a copy for it so that there will be fewer newspapers printed. We have to transport newspapers all over the world. How many trees does it take every day to be chopped down to produce newspapers? Newspapers, which have become sources of drivel to begin with. Why, Thomas, O wizard of smart that you are, are there no studies showing how much carbon is expended by the newspaper industry.
Let’s examine all these ways that carbon is expended. We kill trees. Takes energy to do that. There aren’t any Paul Bunyans out there anymore. And we have to regrow trees. That takes energy. There’s fertilizer involved. You know what that means, Thomas. And the best fertilizer around these days is newspapers. Then we got transportation costs, Thomas. After the drivel is printed on the wasted paper, and then has to be transported to all these places, newsstands, news sites, homes, it’s flown on airplanes. Then there are delivery costs. On and on and on, the cycle is endless. Newspapers, a resource-intensive and labor-intensive business. End ’em. Well, he’s talking about conservation. What good are they anymore, particularly with the Internet. What literal good are newspapers? If you want to reduce the carbon footprint, let’s just end paper copies, hard copies of the New York Times, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal. Let’s just shut ’em down.
By the way, it may be happening anyway. Did you see the story in the New York Times yesterday: ‘Papers Facing Worst Year for Ad Revenue.’ Did you see this? ‘For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies. Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.’ One of the problems of course is what’s happened to the housing market. Real estate ads are not as numerous as they used to be. The LA Times is mentioned in this New York Times story as a paper particularly hard hit by falling advertising revenues. By the way, I wish to point out that our advertising revenues here at the EIB Network are not falling and they have yet to fall in 20 years.
But I wonder why advertising rates at newspapers are falling. Could it be that there is nothing worth in a newspaper looking at these days? Or maybe there are things worth looking at in a newspaper, but there are too many things that offend people in the newspaper that they don’t want to have to read and put up with anymore, all the liberal bias that’s not contained anymore to the editorial page, all over the newspapers. The idea that nobody is getting the truth from anything in the newspaper is simply a bunch of recycled AP garbage and agenda-oriented news. So if ad revenue is down and the paper industry is in deep doo-doo, and we must conserve as the wizard of smart, Tom Friedman, says, let’s just get rid of the hard copies of newspapers. It’s very intensive. Lots of trees could be saved, lots of fertilizer could be saved, lots of fuel, transportation costs could be saved. And a lot of minds, a lot of human minds could be saved.
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RUSH: A lot of people have some other ideas here about what we can do to conserve needed energy using the brilliance of the wizard of smart, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. In addition, let’s say we’re not able to eliminate the hard copy editions of these newspapers, it’s a shame, but it’s a huge carbon footprint involved here in growing the trees, cutting the trees down, fertilizing the trees and transporting: Just tax it. Raise taxes on newspapers, have a newspaper tax, just like they tax us. Governments tax us to affect our activities. We want less, fewer newspapers sold. If you are going to read a newspaper, you should be the one to pay for the damage that manufacturing that newspaper costs every day, so put a two dollar surcharge tax on every newspaper, or more. I mean let’s hit them the way they hit us. They’re not immune from any of this.