GLENN BECK PROGRAM
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GLENN: I want to talk to you about a story that I found in the newspaper that I just couldn't believe. Comes from California. And that's when I decided, yep, I can believe it. Nowhere else would I believe this story until I saw Dateline California. California is asking people now in the California to take one day off of using power. Just turn all your power off for a day. Pretend you are Jewish for a day. Why not? Just say, I'm Jewish; it's the Sabbath; I'm turning everything off. Why not? And they want to do this because, I don't know where, some -- Australia did it and they saved all this energy. And so they think that it would be good to have a blackout but a blackout by choice, from everybody in California. Yeah. Well, California, it's weird because we used to call those blue laws where people just didn't go out and drive their car and go to the mall and use all the energy. They would just stay at home and they would cook and they would, you know, sit around and play cards and, you know, whatever. That saved a lot of money. But you were against that for some reason. I'm trying to remember. Ooh, religious reasons, that's right. So now you've decided to bow down to the altar of your religion, the environment, and you've decided that now everybody should -- everybody should just take a day off. Let me just point this out, California. If America had followed your line of thinking the whole time, we'd probably be a little bit more like... Somalia maybe? Maybe a little like Somalia?

Here's what Thomas Edison would have said if the we were using the California line of thinking. Thomas Edison, when he first invented the light bulb -- well, he wouldn't have done it because he would have given up long before because he would have said, I don't know; this glass blower over here seems like there's a lot of bad stuff coming out of the glass blowers. He's blowing all of these things. And the filaments, we don't know what's in that. I mean, what's up with that? And then the Government would have gotten involved and they would have made the taxes so unbelievably high on Thomas Edison that he wouldn't have been able to afford his little shop. So he wouldn't have invented the light bulb. But let's just say that he did invent the light bulb. The first one that he invented, I don't know, lasted, what, a half hour? Eight minutes? Some ridiculous thing? Using California-think, what Thomas Edison would have then come out and said, these light bulbs, they don't last very long. I suggest that you only use them when you really need to read something important and use candles the rest of the time. I'd like to go the other direction, California. I'd like to say maybe we should invent a better light bulb. Yeah, yeah, yeah! And we should also recognize that Government really hasn't created anything except a bunch of red tape. So maybe we should give this to the people who have actually created stuff. Let them. Tell Government to get out of the way and let them fix the problem. What do you say? I mean, I know it's crazy. It's called something -- oh, I haven't heard it talked about in so long. Oh, I remember. Capitalism. That's what it is. Capitalism in a -- I love this. Oh, my grandparents used to talk about this all the time. Oh, what did they call it? A free market system. Those were so quaint back in the day, weren't they? Oh, when people didn't think socialism was the answer. Gosh. They were silly like that back in the old days.

I'd like to suggest that instead of going the road of Jimmy Carter -- don't get me wrong. One of the best Presidents ever. Instead of going the road of Jimmy Carter, maybe we say conservation really isn't the answer. Maybe the answer is finding a way to make clean energy, find a way to make more energy because that conservation thing, they tried that in the Seventies and it sucked.

I was in church yesterday and heard a great -- they were talking about families and -- in church? What? Yeah. Talking about families and marriage, and there was this class on marriage and my wife's like, "We're going to a class on marriage." I'm like, "Yes, dear." What? I got it down. All you have to know about marriage is "Yes, dear." So we go to this class and they were talking about, you know, are you dating still, are you doing all these things that you're supposed to do, you know, that you did when you first started dating? And people always complain and say their marriage is, you know, falling apart or, you know, it's not what it used to be or whatever. And the question was, well, what are you doing differently from when you dated? I bet you're doing things differently than when you dated. Go back and stop doing the things that don't work and start doing the things that did work because chances are, they still work. I'd like to propose that to California and all the other dim bulbs that might be currently in the United States of America that are looking at socialism or conservation as their main goal. I'd like to stop doing the things that don't work and start doing the things that did work. I think we've got a lot of things.

For instance, here's something that worked: The moon shot. That worked. That was pretty good, huh? Remember? Jack Kennedy gets up and says, ask not what the moon is made of; let's go get the damn cheese. Or whatever it was he said. And he did the, you know, the whole moon shot thing. Worked. People said, this is ridiculous. It worked, and you know what we got out of it? The microwave oven. I'm just sayin'.

So why don't we do a moon shot for energy? Here's an idea. Why don't we just take the shale that we've got and make it into oil? Here's a crazy idea. Why don't we just pump the oil we've got out of the ground? Here's an even crazier idea. Why don't we go and use the cleanest energy ever invented by man? Nuclear power. Oh, well, gee, Glenn, that's horrible. You know, I read this story about nuclear power last week, that it was just so horrible. Nuclear power. In one of the biggest nuclear -- it didn't say one of the. It said in the largest nuclear power incident in American history -- what was it? The largest nuclear incident in American history? Three Mile Island. I just want you to know nothing was actually released. Nobody even got a cough from it. I mean, maybe Billy down the road said, gee, mom, I have the sniffles, and she rushed her to a cancer center right away and they are like, no, he's got the sniffles, it had nothing to do with Three Mile Island. Nothing happened! That's the largest nuclear incident in American history. That doesn't even sound like an incident to me. The backup systems worked and now they're even better.

STU: Glenn, my favorite statistic in regards to nuclear power is the amount of people it's killed here in America as you may know is zero. You may not know that 500 a people a year die by elephants every year across the world. So you've got 500 people being killed --

GLENN: Wait a minute. That's all around the world.

STU: Yes.

GLENN: That's worldwide.

STU: Yes.

GLENN: Well, America, how many people are killed by nuclear power plants all around the world?

STU: The worst nuclear accident was Chernobyl, 100 people died.

GLENN: Have you seen the swings that are just swinging there?

STU: Yeah, they're completely empty. But it could actually be a few, a couple thousand by the end which is what they estimate which is horrible, it's horrible. Although we do things better than the Soviet Union. I don't know if anyone's noticed that. They didn't even have a containment facility on that -- on the power plant. That's a problem. You shouldn't --

GLENN: Everybody is saying, well, look at Chernobyl. It was the Russians! I don't -- my nesting eggs don't operate properly. For the love of Pete, they can't make the little nesting eggs and they don't all fit and you're like, well, this is crap; the one in the middle no longer goes back together. You're going to let them make a nuclear power plant? Of course it doesn't work. We're the United States of America. Good heavens! But let's -- seriously, California, you're onto something. Let me -- I'm going to go back and I'm going to think about that conservation thing. Honey? Once a month I might just say dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, and that will mean, hey, let's pretend we're Jews for a day on the Sabbath and turn everything off. We don't have to be Jews. We could be Amish. We could still believe Jesus is our savior and still be without electricity. Let's be the frickin' Amish. That's great. That's -- it's that kind of thinking that made this country great. It is. Let's live like the Amish.

Tell you what, I'm going to go a step further. I'll going to say we start milking our own cows and churning our own butter as well. Why not? It's better for ya. Works out. Do you know how many people are overweight? Well, maybe they wouldn't be so overweight if they had to churn their own butter, make their own ice cream, and not with electricity, either. They had to ride a bike or something to make their own ice cream. You see what I'm saying? It's that kind of thinking that's going to put this country right back where it belongs.

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