Thanks for posting. I usually only catch 20-30 minutes during my lunch break. I didn't hear this segment.
I like Tancredo's idea of putting a third-party in charge of the relief money, the 'Rats have a bad track record.
Listen to this entire bit via Windows Media Player stream (on the FREE section of Rush's site):
http://mfile.akamai.com/5020/wma/rushlimb.download.akamai.com/5020/clips/05/09/091205_8_liberalism_failed.asx
PS: George Bush, stop eating babies! Hey hey, ho ho, baby eaters got to go!
The poor really are different
The post below is complicated, for some conservatives, by the fact that if the poor acted like the middle class, they wouldn't have problems like no credit or savings.
If poor people did just four things, the poverty rate would be a fraction of what it currently is. Those four things are:
1) Finish high school
2) Get married before having children
3) Have no more than two children
4) Work full time
These are things that 99% of middle class people take as due course. In addition, there's some pretty good evidence that many people who are poor have personality problems that substantially contribute to their poverty.
For example, people with a GED do not experience significant earnings improvement over people who have not graduated from high school. In this credential-mad world, this simply should not be. And it is true even though people with a GED are apparently substantially more intelligent than people without a GED.
How can this be? Even if the GED were totally worthless, available evidence seems to indicate that intelligence carries a premium in the labour market.
The best explanation seems to be that people with a GED (as a group) are smart people with poor impulse control. What intelligence giveth, a tendency to make bad decisions taketh away. Anyone who has spent any time mentoring or working with poor families is familar with the maddening sensation of watching someone you care about make a devastating decision that no middle class person in their right mind would ever assent to.
So I think that conservatives are right that many of the poor dig themselves in deeper. But conservatives tend to take a moralistic stance towards poverty that radically underestimates how much cultural context determines our ability to make good decisions.
Sure, I go to work every day, pay my bills on time, don't run a credit card balance and don't have kids out of wedlock because I am planning for my future. But I also do these things because my parents spent twenty or so years drumming a fear of debt, unemployment, and illegitimacy into my head. And if I announce to my friends that I've just decided not to go to work because it's a drag, they will look at me funny--and if I do it repeatedly, they may well shun me as a loser. If I can't get a house because I've screwed up my credit, middle class society will look upon me with pity, which is painful to endure. If I have a baby with no father in sight, my grandmother will cry, my mother will yell, and my colleagues will act a little odd at the sight of my swelling belly.
In other words, middle class culture is such that bad long-term decision making also has painful short-term consequences. This does not, obviously, stop many middle class people from becoming addicted to drugs, flagrantly screwing up at work, having children they can't take care of, and so forth. But on the margin, it prevents a lot of people from taking steps that might lead to bankruptcy and deprivation. We like to think that it's just us being the intrinsically worthy humans that we are, but honestly, how many of my nice middle class readers had the courage to drop out of high school and steal cars for a living?
I'm not really kidding. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.
Maybe you were different. But think back to the times--and you know there were times--when trying to win the approval of your peers convinced you to do things that were stupid, wrong, or both. Remember what it felt like to be sixteen and skinny and maybe not as charming and self confident as others around you, and ask yourself if you'd really be able to withstand their derision in order to go to college--especially if you didn't even know anyone who'd ever been to college, or have any but the haziest idea of what one might do when one got out. Try to imagine deciding to get a BA when doing so means cutting yourself off from the only world you know and launching yourself into a scary new place where everyone's wealthier, better educated, and more assured than you are.
Or take a minute right now and try to imagine how your friends would react if you announced that you'd decided to quit work, have a baby, and go on welfare. They'd make you feel like an outsider, wouldn't they? And isn't that at least part of the reason that you don't step outside of any of the behavioural boundaries that the middle class has set for itself?
Bad peer groups, like good ones, create their own equilibrium. Doing things that prevent you from attaining material success outside the group can become an important sign off loyalty to the group, which of course just makes it harder to break out of a group, even if it is destined for prison and/or poverty. I think it is fine, even necessary, to recognize that these groups have value systems which make it very difficult for individual members to get a foothold on the economic ladder. But I think conservatives need to be a lot more humble about how easily they would break out of such groups if that is where they had happened to be born.
That leaves us in a rather awkward place, because while I don't agree with conservatives that the poor are somehow worse people than we are, I also don't agree with liberals that money is the answer. Money buys material goods, which are not really the biggest problem that most poor people in America have. And I don't know how you go about providing the things they're missing: the robust social networks, the educational and occupational opportunity, the ability to construct a long-term life instead of one that is lived day-to-day. I think that we should remove the barriers, like poor schools, that block achievement from without, but I don't know what to do about the equally powerful barriers that block it from within.
But I also don't think that the answer is to use those barriers as an excuse to wash our hands of the matter.
[Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin are saying is that it's not their fault, that the government didn't succeed, government didn't work, and government needs to be bigger. The left is saying this proves that government is not yet big enough.]
Question: does anyone know of one country in the world that is a representative republic with small government? I want to move out of this socialist America.
I think this thread ties into the statement by Condi Rice about getting rid of poverty. Get rid of Liberalism...and you get rid of peoverty.
"You think the looting so far has been bad, ha. Wait 'til the looting of the $100 billion starts. You just wait. That's what's being set up now, who is going to be in positions of power to accept that money and distribute it, and I think that a large factor in this is the positioning that the mayor and the governor are taking here to try to be in position to have access to those dollars. When you're in politics, it's all about money. It's all about raising it and spending it because that is where you derive your power, particularly in liberal and socialist-run communities. When you've got the money to pass out, and hand out, you've got the money to buy power. And put two and two together here."
This provides just another opportunity for the Left to further enslave people, to buy votes, and to perpetuate an idea that has failed in every society where it has been allowed to take root.
As usual...Rush is right.
That comes close to being my favorite headline.
Even dogs can be taught not to be enchanted by the human voice.
When push came to shove, almost all of the citizenry of New Orleans, and the surrounding Parrish's managed to get themselves to high ground.
It was the mayor and the governor who failed to inform them of the need to bring food, water, diapers, formula, medications, etc., once it was evident there was no evacuation plan in process. I am appalled at the number of people who have no idea what medications they take and for what, but, that of course is George Bush's fault.
bttt
Rush was right on today. The fed respone was better than its ever been. I still think that some Dems in that state did what they could to delay help in NO just to sling mud on Bush.
Rush has been on the top of his game lately. It's almost like the old days...
It was like music to my ears to hear Rush spell it out so perfectly. We have also seen another characteristic of the parasitic left: whenever their corruption is about to be exposed, make big noises about someone else so that the press focuses on that and not them.
Rush has it right --