RUSH: I guarantee you that if a Republican were in the White House, the media would be talking to you about one thing today, and one thing only, and it is what happened Saturday in Cyprus and what might happen in Italy. I’m gonna take a little test here. Mr. Snerdley, do you know what happened in Cyprus on Saturday? You gotta be kidding me. You read a headline and you don’t know? Brian, do you know what happened in Cyprus on Saturday? Yeah. Not just savings accounts. He said they took money out of people’s savings accounts. What happened was Cypriot banks launder a lot of money for the Russian mob, so those banks are important. Gotta keep ’em open.

The banks are in deep doo-doo, and the government of Cyprus is in deep doo-doo, because it’s leftist, it’s socialist. It’s just like all the rest of the European Union. They’re out of money, and they’re in debt and they’re near collapse. So what they did, the European Union, the euro zone, just decided that they were going to confiscate people’s private property, which is their money. Now, people don’t look at money as property, but it is. It’s as much property as land is or as your house or your car. And they just went in there, and they’re calling it a wealth tax and they’re taking anywhere from 6% to 10% of everybody’s deposits, not just your savings, but everything. Your checking account. Your mistress account — a lot of people there have mistress accounts. Ten percent max, and people have raised hell.

A run on banks in Cyprus began. People started going to ATMs and tried to take all the money they had in the bank out, because that was the only way to protect it. A digital transfer is easy. So if the European Union, the euro zone and the government of Cyprus want 10% of your money, they decided they needed it, they just went and got it. Everybody’s, folks, not just the rich. Not just people who make over 130,000 euros, everybody. I’m telling you, if a Republican were in the White House, that would be the big story, and the question would be, could it happen here? This story is being ignored. It deserves to have a lot of attention focused on it because we are headed in that direction. What happened in Cyprus makes Greece look like a paradise.

Now they’re talking about the same thing possibly happening in Italy. The euro zone is run by a bunch of leftist aristocrats who have no more idea what they’re doing than leftists in this country do. Speaking of leftists, Obama has just nominated a replacement for Hilda Solis at the Labor Department. Okay, I’ll tell you who this guy is. This guy’s name is Tom Perez, and he may as well be Hugo Chavez. And that is not an exaggeration. Yep. Tom Perez is his name, and I’ll tell you who this guy is. He is the guy in the Department of Justice in the civil rights division who made the call not to prosecute the New Black Panthers. I want to play a little game with you, folks. In a hypothetical, let’s replace Obama with George W. Bush and the Black Panthers with the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, I want you to try to imagine Bush’s head of the Civil Rights Division not prosecuting Klanners when they engage in voter intimidation, and then — after not prosecuting Klanners for that — imagine what would happen if Bush turned around and nominated the Grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan to a cabinet position where he would be deciding on discrimination lawsuits. That is exactly what’s happened here. There would be unmitigated hell to pay if that had happened.

If George W. Bush puts a Klansman in his cabinet, there would be hell to pay. That’s essentially what’s happened here. This guy, Tom Perez… I read a piece at PJ Media today by our old buddy J. Christian Adams who was in the Justice Department and who was prosecuting the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. He was prosecuting them when Holder shut it down, just ended it. There was evidence to convict a mile long, and J. Christian Adams had seen investigation pulled out from under him, and he retired.

He resigned. He quit. He said, there’s no point in me being here. PJ Media has written this up is this way: “Today, President Obama issues a challenge to Republican senators: In nominating Tom Perez as labor secretary, he implies that Senate Republicans don’t have either the guts or organizational skill to stop” it. This guy, Tom Perez, is a Hugo Chavezite who may be “the most radical left-wing cabinet member in history.” Now, J. Christian Adams’ book is Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.

He described this guy, Perez, in it. But the New Black Panther case is just one case that this guy was involved in. Remember, we’re talking about radical leftists and what they do. The umbrella for this is what happened in Cyprus, because it is a very logical question: Could that happen here? You’ve heard Jesse Jackson demand that the government just go grab people’s pension funds. We’ve heard discussion of how the government might “buy,” quote/unquote, your 401(k) from you.

They’ll give you the equivalent value of it now, promise you 1% to 3% annual interest on it, but eliminate the tax deduction for your annual contribution because the government can’t “afford” it. There are any number of stashes of money like that. With $16 trillion in debt, they can go do it if there isn’t any hell to pay. If the Euro Zone just confiscates between six and 10% of everybody’s money in Cyprus and nobody complains about it, and there won’t be a lot of complaint if the media doesn’t cover it, then it is a logical question to ask:

Could it happen here?

We’ve got the same kind of people running this government as are running all those European so-called socialist democracies. An example is this Perez guy, the new nominee for Secretary of Labor. Again, the New Black Panther case was just one small part of his tenure at the Justice Department. He was involved in the eighth grade transvestite lawsuits in New York, and the race quotas in New York City. This Perez guy is at the forefront of Obama’s war on the Catholic Church and demanding that contraceptives be given away.

This is the man who overruled career lawyers in the Department of Justice in the South Carolina voter ID case. He is a classic, classic radical leftist. That’s not gonna get reported much today. To the extent that I’m talking about it, people will say, “Sour grapes, sour grapes.” The point is, it’s not sour grapes. I’m just trying to tell you what’s going on.