Schumer to Jindal: Eat Porkulus

RUSH: Jocelyn in Houston, as we go back to the phones. You’re next, and it’s great to have you here. Hello.

CALLER: Hello. Hi. Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, ma’am.

CALLER: My question to you is, we’re all learning about widespread failure in banking and mortgage practices and I’m wondering: Where’s the focus on state government mismanagement of funds? You know, Michigan, New York, California, Florida, Ohio. I read all the time about horrible things that they’re doing with people’s money. I saw on RedState.com Chuck Schumer sends a letter today to the Office of Management and Budget demanding that all states take all aspects of the Porkulus bill.

RUSH: In fact, let me —

CALLER: Is that just covering for them?

RUSH: Yeah, let me play these. We’ve got those sound bites from Schumer.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: And this is an attack on Bobby Jindal. Schumer is attacking Jindal because Jindal said he didn’t want the hundred million dollars for unemployment because it would have altered the rules of the state. Now you hang on, Jocelyn.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: We’re coming right back. On Scarborough’s show today, Scarborough said, ‘We understand you’re going to be sending a letter to the White House urging the administration to stop any governors from having the authority adopt some parts of the bill while rejecting others. Is this your way of telling governors to put up or shut up?’

SCHUMER: Governor Jin-doll (sic) and others are sort of trying to have it both ways. They want to oppose the package but take 99% of the money, and then to sort of prove their bona fides to the conservative base that they’re talking to… This was never intended by Congress to be an a la carte menu. You either take it or not. It’s a complete package. They ought to take it or leave it and stop playing the political games that they seem to be playing, trying to have it both ways.

RUSH: You know, this is… Chuck-U, you’re just wrong. The governors are going to have no choice. They’re going to all have to take it. There’s a provision that allows the federal government to tell the legislatures in these states, that they have to take the money. Whether the governors want to or not, they can be forced to take the whole thing. So Scarborough says, ‘We’ve been talking about how you get Wall Street and the investment community more confident in the banking situation. What would you like the White House and Congress to do in the next couple of weeks to turn that around?’

SCHUMER: Well, the first job is to get this, uh, stimulus package working, and that’s sorta why the games that the governor is playing — Governor Jin-doll and others — should stop, and that’s what this letter is intended to do. You know, the American people want action. They realize — and Wall Street does, too — that we’re in uncharted waters. But they know one thing. Just saying nothing, saying do nothing, just poking holes at things, without —

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah!

SCHUMER: — trying to do something, isn’t going to accomplish much.

RUSH: So here we go. We gotta try something, whether it works or not, and the more it doesn’t work the better off we are. But also we have a United States Senator sending threatening letters to governors telling them what they have to do. This is a United States Senator is doing this! So Jocelyn, one of your points: ‘Where does all this stop,’ right?

CALLER: Mmm-hmm. It doesn’t make sense. The states themselves have mismanaged their own budget so grotesquely in certain states. I mean, certainly in Michigan, certainly in New York and California, and I don’t understand why no one has focused on the details of how they run their states as opposed to the federal government as supposed to just make this all work.

RUSH: I’ll tell you how this works, because what happens — be it a governor or a mayor or a city councilman — is they’ll come out and they will say, ‘Yes, we got budget problems but if we don’t do something we’re going to have lay off firemen. We’ll have to lay off police. We’ll have to shut down garbage collection to only a day or two a week,’ and people don’t want to let go of those services, and so they will accommodate whatever the mayor or the governor or the city councilman wants because they’re threatened. The fear cycle is used. We never hear, ‘Well, we can get rid of about 75% of the people in the education department or state because they’re not really needed. They’re not doing anything. We’re wasting money.’ There’s so much money these states have that they could cut without getting rid of vital services and so forth. But people never stop to examine how the states are being run because that’s… You know, politics is local and that’s where they have direct contact with what the state and local governments do.

CALLER: It’s shocking. I mean, half the money that was afforded for rebuilding after Katrina hasn’t even been used yet ’cause the local government there is trying to get more money from the federal government. Over half the money that was awarded for recovery after Katrina hasn’t even been used. It’s shocking! (laughs)

RUSH: Yeah. Well, see, this is the thing. You and I understand what the purpose is of the people spending the money. You understand the purpose was never fixing New Orleans.

CALLER: Yep. Never. I don’t understand how Mayor Ray Nagin still has an office or still is employed. I literally don’t understand how people don’t realize —

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: — that there’s all this money being held up at the state level, so…

RUSH: Intellectually I don’t understand how Obama got elected.

CALLER: I don’t, either. (giggles)

RUSH: Intellectually I don’t know how Clinton got elected.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: We could really frustrate ourselves if we start asking these questions. Intellectually, I don’t understand why anybody gives two hoots in hell what Sean Penn says.

CALLER: I know! It’s discouraging.

RUSH: I don’t understand any of this intellectually.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: Intellectually it makes no sense. That’s why we just frustrate ourselves looking at it intellectually. About Katrina, it was not about fixing Katrina. This was simply something the left had been waiting and hoping for to dump on Bush, to win the next election. They don’t care about the people of New Orleans. If they cared about the people of New Orleans — they ran the damn place! They would have fixed the levees in the first place.

CALLER: That’s right.

RUSH: Democrats ran the state. They ran New Orleans. If Democrats cared about black people, black people wouldn’t be in the squalor they’re in. If they cared about Hispanics and other minorities, they would be in the squalor they’re in. The Democrats don’t care about the people they claim to care about. They care about themselves.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: They care about amassing power and using it. Look, I’ve gotten blue in the face talking about it because everybody in this audience has heard it and knows it.

CALLER: Well, yeah.

RUSH: The frustrating thing for you is, you feel, why are there so many stupid idiots around you —

CALLER: Yes! (laughs)

RUSH: — who do not understand this and do understand have the same curiosity you have and aren’t asking the same questions.

CALLER: It’s like New York State passed a law that they were allowed to have a lottery and every penny was supposed to go to education. So they passed it. Not in the history of the lottery has a penny found its way to education, and no one talks about it.

RUSH: Look…

CALLER: They go, ‘Oh, okay.’

RUSH: We have a story in the Houston Chronicle today. You’re about to get the shaft again, do you know this?

CALLER: Yeah. (laughs)

RUSH: Somebody down there is going to give everybody $3,000 to raise their credit scores so they can get $3,000 bucks to wipe out credit card debt so they can go get a mortgage.

CALLER: The question no one seems to ask — and thank you so much for talking about this — is how is this going to be paid for? I’d like to hear Chuck Schumer’s answer to that. How is this going to be paid for? Nobody wants to talk about that. (laughs)

RUSH: No. Well, how is what Obama is doing going to be paid for? We’re printing the money.

CALLER: It’s an outrage.

RUSH: Nobody is asking how it’s paid for. It doesn’t have to be. When the government does it, it doesn’t have to be paid for. All that has to be happen is the achievers have to get screwed, too. The achievers have to get theirs.

CALLER: His whole worldview is so different than what I want America to be.

RUSH: Look, it’s a dire circumstance. It is worse than at any time in my life. It’s not comparable to a war where there’s bloodshed, but it is certainly a war.