This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by the patriotism of arson and insurance fraud
By Simon Maloy

Steyn got the second hour rolling with a discussion of the rumored second stimulus package. Steyn said once you shovel all that money down the hole and blow it on nothing, it becomes easier to do it a second time. And this is on top of government health care, which they want to do in the next five weeks. By the way, said Steyn, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) says his version of the health care plan is the one they should use because it costs less than $1 trillion. That's become the selling point now, and they're treating it as chump change, so we're supposed to applaud Max Baucus for holding his plan down under $1 trillion, like that's great news. But the bad news is this second stimulus, said Steyn. What you need to do to get the economy going again is to have people spend money, and for people to spend money you have to have an environment in which doing business is profitable. But the Democrats are taking that environment away.

The first stimulus failed because we've only spent 10 percent of the money, said Steyn, which means they're not spending it fast enough. The reason for that isn't hard to work out, he said -- for the money to do any good, people would have to be assured that the money would be a permanent part of life. But the Democrats don't want you just spending your money, they want to spend it in the right way. And that, said Steyn, is the statist viewpoint. And the trouble with that is it does nothing to stimulate anything other than government control and bureaucracy. The stimulus, he said, is not stimulating anything.

Steyn then said that he saw a newspaper in Vermont a couple of months ago that had a quarter-page ad from this community organizing group, which was seeking applications for several positions funded wholly or in part by the stimulus. So the money is funding these community organizing groups, said Steyn, and that is why the stimulus failed. The jobs funded by the stimulus are focused on the stimulus. It's not doing anything out in the real world where real people live, said Steyn. So you hear that, Vermont? You're not even part of the “real world,” let alone “real America.” Anyway, Steyn also noticed that Tim Horton's coffee and doughnut chain is reorganizing as a Canadian company to take advantage of Canadian tax rates. That's a phrase that probably never passed any American executive's lips until Obama became president, said Steyn, but these executives can see that, under Obama, they'll soon be paying a lot more in taxes. And now with cap and trade, they're making it more expensive to operate a business in the United States, and more difficult to even live in the U.S.

Steyn said what he has always loved about America is that you can insulate yourselves from the baser aspects of society. This is the cheapest country in the Western world to buy a nice lot and house and live in peace, said Steyn, but cap and trade is going to make it so the government can intrude and regulate every aspect of your life.

After the break, Steyn took a call from an Ohio woman who said she was 30 years old when the Carter administration handed the Reagan administration something not as bad as what “the liberals claim Bush handed Obama,” and now GM is leaving Ohio. This caller offered an amusing glimpse into the cognitively dissonant conservative mind -- Jimmy Carter completely ruined the economy for Reagan, but there is no way that Bush passed this economic crisis on to Obama. Anyway, Steyn said there are things that all levels of government should do, but they're very limited in number, and when governments try to do more things than they should, they're not able to handle those core responsibilities well. Then Steyn set his sights on Vice President Biden, saying that Biden said the administration misread how bad the economy was, but Obama had been going around saying that the economy was in the worst crisis we've seen since the Great Depression, so how could they not know how bad the economy was?

Steyn returned from the break with Biden still on the brain, saying that the vice president said the stimulus was a bust because we didn't know how bad the economy was. That's actually not what Biden said, and economists think the stimulus bill didn't go far enough. Anyway, Steyn moved on to say that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is saying that Republicans who don't support the administration's positions are rooting for America to fail. So if you're opposed to imposing a “national regime of economic sclerosis,” you're against America. Congressman Waxman has it exactly backwards, said Steyn -- what we're seeing is a sustained war against everything the United States was founded on. But Steyn did say this of the left -- when they take power, they don't waste any time. Obama knows that if you just keep throwing this stuff at the wall, a lot of it is eventually going to slip through unscrutinized. Look at the cap-and-trade bill, said Steyn -- it didn't even exist when it was voted upon! Actually, it did.

Steyn said this is the opposite of a republic of citizen legislators, and it is not un-American to stand up and oppose it. This is a serious crisis for the American ideal -- Waxman is presenting us with the choice of whether or not we want to go down the same route the Europeans went down a generation ago. Waxman is attempting to demonize the opposition, said Steyn, and it won't work.

After the break, Steyn took a call from a gentleman who said “these people” think they're going to make him upgrade his house before he sells it. Instead, said the caller, he'll just burn the house, collect insurance money, sell the lot, and buy a new house. Rather than dissuade the caller from committing arson and insurance fraud in the name of liberty, Steyn said that's the easiest way to do it -- just burn it and sell the property as an empty lot. That's what people start doing when living under oppressive regimes, said Steyn.

Steyn rounded out the hour with one last caller, a woman who wanted to comment on this idea that they didn't even write the cap-and-trade bill before voting on it. The caller, who said she's a nurse, said all the forms have to be filled out before doctors can perform surgery. Steyn said the definition of tyranny is passing a bill with a bunch of holes and saying we'll fill in the blanks later. Steyn also said he would ban 1,200-page bills, because that means it's too complicated to be any good, and it shuts out the citizenry.

Greg Lewis and Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.