This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by our shared space dorkery with fill-in Davis
By Greg Lewis

The final hour of the week got started with Vice President Biden's “quote of the day.” According to the reporting at CNSNews.com, Biden said, “We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt.” Davis read the full quote from the article and said that we have a “math question here.” If you take what we spend to reform health care, would the number be larger or smaller than the cost of applying conservative, free-market principles to health care? He elaborated on his point by looking at the bailouts from last fall. It would have been bad for the banks and auto companies to go under, he said, but if we had let them fail, would that have amounted to the same level of spending and debt from the bailouts and “stimuli”?

Then Davis took a caller who wondered how subsidizing health care to make it less expensive to the consumer would help reform the system. Davis agreed, explaining that cost control in “ObamaCare” wouldn't “make sense” like free-market cost controls would. When the government is controlling costs, explained Davis, that's when they look at your grandmother and say she's not worth keeping around much longer. The caller then said that we need to think about offering incentives to lower costs, like the way McDonald's offers incentives to develop innovative materials for their drinking cups.

We've spent quite a bit of time explaining why pure free-market solutions to health care, as Davis is advocating, don't make a whole lot of sense because there are moral and social aspects to medicine. So you can argue that health care is no different than dog kenneling or car maintenance, as Rush has, or fast food, as Davis' caller did, but that ignores the fact that dog kenneling, oil changes, and Big Macs are nothing like medical care. Not having access to dogsitters or mechanics may result in inconvenience, but failure to obtain proper medical treatment from a professional results in lost wages, lost employment, permanent impairment, or death. We like quoting Matt Yglesias in this situation: "[M]edicine has never really been understood as a commercial enterprise. A doctor is, in our social understanding, not a 'medical treatments salesman' any more than a soldier is a mercenary."

The next caller wanted to tell Davis about a question posed to him by his “socialist professor” a long time ago. His professor had posited that there are millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico, but we don't have nearly as many illegal immigrants from Canada, so Canadians must generally like their health care system, or they'd be leaving. Davis said the argument is a straw man. Canada is by and large a pretty great country filled with pretty happy people, but its health care system is not as good as ours, and Canadians do come across the border to obtain certain treatments and procedures. However, Mexico is a struggling Third World nightmare, which also has a lot of nice things going for it and great people. But the plight of the average Mexican can be sufficiently dire enough for them to come to America, either legally or illegally. The average Canadian would like to remain a Canadian.

After the break, Davis spent some time talking with NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger, and discussed the Apollo moon landing and the space program. No objections here. Linenger called for the country to stop “moping” about the recession -- after all, we're the country that put a man on the moon. Returning from another commercial break, Davis spent some time recounting the troubled MIR mission that Linenger was involved with in 1997 and some of his other accomplishments.

Then it was back to politics. Davis played a few clips of Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) questioning of Sotomayor regarding the second amendment. Coburn asked if Sotomayor thought there was a “right to personal self-defense,” but Sotomayor found the question to be too abstract for her to answer. Notably, Davis jokingly described Coburn as “kinda crazy” in that “he really thinks the Second Amendment means he gets to own a gun to protect himself,” adding: “I guess I am, too. I don't know. It's one of those whacky notions we have that the words in the Constitution actually mean what they say.” Remember way back in the first hour when Davis was saying that conservatives lament liberal appointees' tendency to depart from the tenets of the Constitution, while liberals lament conservative appointees' tendency to cleave to the Constitution? Davis was particularly piqued by the fact that those liberals somehow discovered a “right to privacy” in the Constitution. Well, here, he's arguing that the “words” of the Second Amendment confer upon citizens the right to self-defense, even though the words “self-defense” -- or any synonym thereof -- do not appear in the Second Amendment. You can argue that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to provide Americans the means of their own self-defense, but that's very different from the “right” to self-defense. So we guess we're supposed to cleave to the words of the Constitution, except for when it's ideologically expedient to do otherwise.

One more break, and Davis returned with a caller who questioned how any politician could possibly stand against repealing the 16th Amendment. Davis gave the caller a hypothetical -- say we could wave a wand to make the income tax disappear entirely, what would happen? How would the government get money that even conservatives admit it needs to perform basic functions? The caller, with little empathy in his voice, said he would let the chips fall where they may, and that people would have more money on their hands, allowing them to make decisions at the community level. Davis described how politically unlikely it would be for the amendment to be repealed, but noted that the country managed to survive for a long time without it.

Well, that was three hours of Mark Davis for ya. Maybe not the usual three hours jam-packed with the level of objectionable content that we're used to, but fear not! Rush will be back on Monday, and we'll surely forget this brief reprieve rather quickly. If you can't wait until then for your Rush fix, we're positive that our Limbaugh Wire archives will scratch that itch for you over the long July weekend.

Simon Maloy, Zachary Pleat, and Ariana Probinsky contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.