RUSH: I mentioned this earlier, a story here in the Wall Street Journal: ”As Economy Weakens, Sports Feel a Chill’ — The crisis in financial markets is sending a chill through the sports industry, cooling the ardor of many longtime season-ticket holders and formerly deep-pocketed corporate sponsors. Fans have packed the nation’s stadiums for the baseball playoffs this fall, and end-zone tickets for next month’s football game between the New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys are fetching hundreds of dollars. But, as the upheaval in global markets, mounting job losses in the US and other signs of a worsening economy continue to undermine consumer confidence, it is already clear sports won’t escape unscathed. ‘We’re not just competing for people’s entertainment dollars anymore,’ said Brett Yormark, chief executive of the National Basketball Association’s New Jersey Nets. ‘We’re going up against milk and orange juice.” And he’s right. You know, sports does compete for the leisure time dollar, and in a lot of places, there aren’t any leisure time dollars, or certainly not enough to afford what it costs to go to a sports game.
Now, I just noticed that the New York Mets moving into a new stadium next year have sold out their primo club seats already. So the economy is still sufficient for some of them. But a couple of things that came to mind as I read the story. You have to think about it a little, and when you do, you realize how blessed we have been the last eight years. As they say where I grew up, we’ve been in high cotton. We have been in high cotton. Why is that? Why have people had wild amounts of money and why have people had disposable income, why have people been able to improve and enhance their lifestyles? One reason is tax cuts. There is no disputing that. And it’s beyond me why something so simple that works every time it’s done does not get done more often, although for the Democrats I understand it fully. They don’t want this kind of prosperity. Obama does not want America with this kind of prosperity. Look at his tax plan and see it, talk to the plumber in Toledo. He knows it. Obama does not desire this kind of prosperity. This kind of prosperity threatens the modern-day Democrat Party, because it gives you mobility and gives you freedom. They want to control as much of your life as possible.
Take a look at what was happening — this is the thing that really struck me, though, and we had these stories all last week and the week before about how the scientific community is all upset with the economy going south and may not be able to fund global warming research and all these things. Ask yourselves a question here. Just in the past month, how many stories on global warming and the end of the world have you seen? You haven’t seen any. In fact, AP had a story last week, suddenly global warming’s not so important. And we find out today there’s a story in the Stack that the Arctic glaciers have actually grown because it’s getting colder. When I read that, I got infuriated, I must tell you. Everything the liberals tell us is a lie. Global warming is a hoax, all these things, but the fascinating thing is that when we are prosperous and when we are doing well, people have all kinds of time on their hands to invest in silly little causes to make themselves feel relevant, to give them a sense that their lives have meaning. But you let the economy hit the skids, and guess what? All these petty little causes just are forgotten.
Nobody cares about global warming right now, except the people that are involved in it, trying to make sure that taxes get raised for that. Now, if Obama is elected, we’re going to have taxes raised for global warming because he does look at it as what it is, a further opportunity to control people. But I’m talking about just the general population. In the last month, have your kids come home from school: ‘Mommy, Mommy, the polar bears, the ice is melting, we gotta do something about global warming, Mommy, Mommy. Mommy, did you see where the animals in South America are dying because they’re cutting down the rain forest?’ Have you heard any of that from your kids coming home from school? Has your school demanded that you come in and watch Algore’s propaganda movie with the students in the past month? No. What everybody’s doing now, studying Barack Obama. The schools are telling the kids how great Obama is and how great same-sex marriage is. First graders are going on field trips in San Francisco to see their teacher get married to her lesbian lover. They’re not talking about global warming.
My point is that when prosperity reigns, all kinds of freaks have all kinds of time on their hands to get involved in a bunch of things that are really not important and really made-up things. But when economic times are tough, or people perceive they’re tough, then the focus gets really serious. And when people get really serious, guess what they stop thinking about? All these frivolous things, such as global warming and other related environmentalist wacko issues. Have you heard anybody say, we gotta stop buying SUVs during this period of time to save the planet? No. You hear people saying, ‘My gosh, I wish people could start buying some new cars.’ They can’t because the economic crunch, dealerships are shutting down, all this sort of stuff. We’re to the point now where dealers and everybody else would be happy if somebody had the money to go out and buy an SUV. Six weeks ago, an SUV was going to kill the planet. Today, it will save it.