Caller: Food Pantry is Overflowing

RUSH: Kensett, Arkansas. This is Ruth. Welcome, Ruth. Great to have you on the program.

CALLER: Thank you, Mr. Rush. I appreciate that.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Let me just thank you, thank you, thank you for what you do. I don’t know how you do it. I’m a little nervous here, but we just appreciate what you do so much.

RUSH: Thank you so much. You don’t sound nervous at all.

CALLER: Oh, well, let me tell you, I may get you going here. We are mad out here, no doubt about it. I don’t really have any great words of wisdom, and, to tell you the truth, people may get aggravated what we do. One of the things my husband and I do is volunteer for our church’s food pantry. And I can tell you this. It is not getting better out there. We have more people than we have ever seen. We’re a small pantry. We give away food and clothes once a week —

RUSH: What kind of food do you give away?

CALLER: Well, whatever we can get from the food bank in Little Rock. And it depends on what they have, what we give. We get canned goods and meats, dry goods, things like that.

RUSH: Do you give away food that has to be cooked?

CALLER: Yes, sir, we do.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And some of it is not, but some of it is. Some of it’s perishable, sometimes there’s fresh produce. It just depends on what’s donated to them.

RUSH: I feel like I’m doing this show in 1930s.

CALLER: Yeah. Well, I know, but people are hurting out there. We have more homeless than we’ve ever seen before. We feed between 20 and 30 families a week, and we’re a small pantry. And we have more people living in churches, living out of their car, moving into garages with friends, because they’re hurting out there. And some of these people know they’re not looking for work, we have elderly and retired that need help. But also we have people that come in that are looking for work. Every week we have people coming in asking if we have any ideas for work, you know, where they might find work or workloads, you know. But it is sad out there, it is hard. And there’s little children living in places like this, and —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — it’s hard on people. I just don’t know how you do what all you do. I can’t even stand to watch Obama, tell you the truth. How you can watch them and listen to them. Of course you have to, I know, to report and everything. But it is unreal. I tell you, I’m going to tell a little story on myself. Years ago, oh, back in the last century as my husband likes to say, he came in one evening and he said, ‘Have you heard about this Rush Limbaugh guy?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And that was when you were on late night TV.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: So we started watching you. Now, the first time I heard you, I told my husband, I said, ‘Hmm, he thinks a little bit of himself, doesn’t he?’ My husband said, ‘Well, listen,’ and being the fair-minded person I have always tried to be, I started listening to you.

RUSH: And you probably said, ‘Boy, they’re not going to let this guy stay on the air very long.’

CALLER: (laughing) Well, it didn’t take me too long to learn that you’re the man that has the finger on the political pulse of America, no doubt about it, and we do appreciate what you do and I know it’s hard on you. My concern is that if we get Republicans, when we get Republicans in there in November, are they going to be able to sustain this? In 2012 we won’t go back in with another Democrat in there? I just hope we’re very conservative —

RUSH: Can’t predict the future, it’s going to depend on which kind of Republicans are elected. It will be Republicans that are elected, there’s no question. As I listen to her, the food pantry and the food bank, I’m reminded that the federal government routinely advertises food stamps. What happened to that program? Are these people somehow ineligible for food stamps? That would be hard to believe because we’ve seen the newspaper ads: ‘You might be eligible for food stamps, call the Department of Agriculture at this number,’ and I’ll betcha virtually everybody who calls is qualified. (interruption) You have to have an address for food stamps? Uhhhhhhhh, maybe. Well, if that’s the case, the government ought to set a food stamp outlet store for people to walk in and have them passed out.

All right, I’m sorry to do this to you folks. We did this story back on the 2nd of April. Here it is again. It is from the Greenville, South Carolina news: ‘Ten people illegally in the United States pleaded guilty for their involvement in a four-year, $13 million fraud against the Internal Revenue Service, acting US Attorney Kevin F. McDonald said Thursday. Nine defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and for entering the United States without authorization, Assistant US Attorney.’ So illegals have figured out how to bilk the IRS. Or, well, I guess they did bilk them because they were convicted here. I was going to ask, ‘Maybe they just gave ’em the money?’

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, you do not need an address to get food stamps. From the government’s website, we went and looked it up, homeless people and food stamps. If you are homeless you can still get food stamps even if you don’t have an address, a place to stay, or a place to cook. You’re considered homeless if you do not have a fixed regular nighttime residence or your primary night residence is temporary, in a supervised shelter, a halfway house, the residence of another person, or a place not designed for regular sleeping, such as a hallway. So if you live in a hallway you can get food stamps. It’s right from the government’s website. I mean, they’re selling the stuff. You’ve seen the ads periodically. At the end every budget year they try to get more people set up on food stamps so that the budget doesn’t get cut the next year.