This is a partial transcript from “Hannity & Colmes,” June 11, 2007, that has been edited for clarity.
SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Joining us now, with the exclusive first look at his brand new book, it’s called “Outrage” — long title — “How Illegal Immigration, the United Nations, Congressional Rip-offs, Student Loan Overcharges, Tobacco Companies, Trade Protection, Drug Companies are Ripping Us Off and What to Do About It,” former Clinton adviser Dick Morris.
DICK MORRIS, POLITICAL STRATEGIST: And the byline’s longer. It’s Dick Morris and Eileen McGann.
HANNITY: And Eileen McGann. I don’t want to forget your wife.
First of all, I’ve read all of your books. They have all been bestsellers. I read this book, and I found myself getting angrier, and it really evoked outrage in me, starting with the issue we’ve been debating now for weeks, which is illegal immigration.
MORRIS: Absolutely. You know, the whole focus in this debate has been justifiably on the border, but there are 12.5 million illegals already here.
HANNITY: True.
MORRIS: Do you know how many federal agents we have dedicated to tracking them down, and finding them, and deporting them? Two thousand.
HANNITY: It’s outrageous.
MORRIS: And when we finally catch them, we have 27,500 cells to put them in. And just to put that in perspective, there are 300,000 illegal immigrants now in felony prisons, state and federal prisons, and we won’t be able to deport them when they get out.
HANNITY: I’m going to tell you something — and Alan, we, and you, everyone ought to disagree with us. We’ve had five and a half years to close the border. You know, we’ve had since 1986, the last amnesty bill. And you know what? We’re vulnerable to terrorists, and you point out the level of corruption in Congress, in both houses — you tell stories about putting their wives on the payrolls, contributions. You call them personal bribes.
MORRIS: Well, look, Barbara Boxer — let’s take her as an example — she paid her lobbyist son, Douglas, $130,000 over four years to run her political action committee. She’s the senator from California. Now, when a special interest gives Boxer $130,000 campaign contributions from all of them, that doesn’t go to a TV ad. That goes to her son, which may go to his personal bank account.
HANNITY: It’s unbelievable.
MORRIS: And there are 40 or so members that do that. Howard Berman, a Democrat of California, a real liberal, paid his brother $205,000. Bernie Sanders, the democrat independent socialist from Vermont, he paid his wife $91,000 and his stepdaughter $65,000.
HANNITY: You know, Dick, I will tell you this. I don’t know why there isn’t more outrage in this country about things and about issues. You know, and let’s be honest. We covered Paris Hilton last Friday. We spent a lot of time on it. We’ll have an update tonight. But it seems there’s more of an obsession. People care more about a ridiculous story about one young girl than they want to care about, you know, controlling our borders, pushing back terrorists, and this book points out a lot of this.
MORRIS: And one of the — my favorite thing, my absolutely favorite of all time in this book, is something my wife dug up. Let me read you the bylaws of the American Civil Liberties Union.
HANNITY: This is great. I read this, this afternoon.
MORRIS: ACLU, “A director may not criticize the ACLU board or staff. Where an individual director disagrees with the board position on matters of civil liberties, he should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact that there’s such disagreement.” That’s the bylaws of the American Civil Liberties Union.
HANNITY: What happened to free speech in the ACLU?
MORRIS: And, you know, you go through these earmarks. They drive you crazy. Half a million dollars for a teapot museum, $13.5 million for the world toilet summit, $1 million for water-free urinal convention.
HANNITY: Here’s my question, because — you know, we can argue — or Democrats, Alan, would argue that 2006 was about outrage. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. I think there’s a certain level of the American population that literally just accepts this corruption on a very high level, and I don’t know what it’s going to take. One time, I believe, there will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and that there will be a backlash. Is it building?
MORRIS: The problem is that there’s nobody they can vote for. Dennis Hastert, when he was speaker, his son, Joshua, owned a record. He moved to Washington. He said he was a lobbyist, and he got Google as his first client. Then the Democrats run against it, so Nancy Pelosi takes over. Her son just got a job from Info USA…
HANNITY: $175 grand.
MORRIS: … for $170,000, the company Bill Clinton works for that peddles lists of elderly with Alzheimer’s disease.
ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Dick, you also point out — speaking of Hastert — by the way, I noticed for a moment there with Sean you were only talking about Democrats, but Hastert made $2 million from a land deal…
MORRIS: That’s right.
COLMES: And you point this out in the book, that benefited from…
HANNITY: Harry Reid.
COLMES: … from legislation he supported, legislation that cost the taxpayer $204 million.
MORRIS: What he did was he bought this property…
COLMES: $207 million.
MORRIS: … and then he got earmarked a road that went right by the property. And it doubled or tripled the value of his property.
COLMES: You talk about the book about things we should ban. Let’s ban relatives of congresspeople and senators working as lobbyists, for one thing.
MORRIS: Or, for example, drug companies. The extent to which drug companies hire sales representatives, who then go out and hawk the products, and they bribe doctors by telling them, “We’re paying you to give a seminar.” It’s really to bribe them to tell the other doctors to prescribe these drugs. And as a result, drugs, prescription drugs, are now 1 percent of our national economy.
COLMES: Didn’t the administration have a chance to make a deal with drug companies to buy in bulk to really help bring down the cost of drugs and they decided not to do that?
MORRIS: No, that’s a phony issue, because the — the issue was, are they supposed to negotiate with drug companies? But then the problem was that they would not allow them to blacklist certain drug companies so they couldn’t negotiate. But I will tell you what’s a huge nightmare. The state of California put up a ballot proposition to say, “Let’s require generic drugs to be prescribed under Medicaid.” Generic drugs are 52 percent of the drug prescriptions and only 10 percent of the cost.
COLMES: Right.
MORRIS: And the doctors — the drug companies, not the doctors, wallpapered California with money and beat the proposition.
COLMES: You’re talking about actual drug companies bribing, in effect, doctors in this book.
MORRIS: Well, there are several drug companies that are actually under indictment for bribery, for outright bribery. And in this book, we name the names. We tell you exactly which companies are guilty of what, which congressmen are paying their wives and spouses, which congressmen have lobbyists. Harry Reid has three sons and a son-in-law who are lobbyists in charge of lobbying him.
COLMES: Tom DeLay had his family on the payroll.
MORRIS: Tom DeLay put his wife on the campaign payroll for $300,000.
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: You say ban relatives of senators and congresspeople from taking jobs as lobbyists, ban trade quotas that drive up prices and save very few jobs, ban drug companies that we talked about, ban them from backing out of Katrina coverage.
MORRIS: Well, let me just tell you about the companies. You’ve heard everybody talk about how we’re saving American jobs, OK? So, for example, we have big sugar quotas. The average American housewife and husband pays twice as much for sugar as they should per pound. Do you know how many jobs that saves? 2,261. Do you know what the cost per job saved is? $826,000.
HANNITY: Good grief.
COLMES: So they don’t really balance the saving of jobs with the trade regulations?
MORRIS: It has nothing to do with jobs. They cite the jobs, and then they pocket the money in profits. Katrina, you’re in good hands with All State? Nationwide is on your side? Nonsense. What they did was they said that, because that, in Katrina, we’ll pay for the wind damage, but not the water damage. Now, with a hurricane, how do you differentiate? It’s like in “Merchant of Venice,” we want a pound of flesh but not the blood.
HANNITY: I want to get back — and, by the way, you can get signed copies of Dick’s new book at your Web site, DickMorris.com.
MORRIS: DickMorris.com. I autographed 4,000 of them.
HANNITY: I want to know how this outrage is going to impact in the next election. And I’m going to, for the first time, put you on record who you think the candidates from both parties are going to be.
MORRIS: OK.
HANNITY: We’ll have much more of Dick Morris when we get back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COLMES: We now continue with the author of the brand-new book, “Outrage,” former Clinton adviser Dick Morris. You know, there’s enough in here for everybody, because I thought, “Oh, a Dick Morris book. What am I going to go after Dick about?” But actually there is a lot of stuff in here on all sides of the spectrum. For example, you talk about the tobacco companies and John Boehner passing out checks on the floor of the House.
MORRIS: The new House majority leader went onto the floor of Congress and passed out campaign contributions from the tobacco companies. But what drove me completely berserk about the tobacco companies was, after they said that it causes cancer, after Philip Morris set up this phony new company, Altria, as a way of making people think they’re altruistic, 92 cigarette brands raised the nicotine content, and only 24 didn’t. The worst offender was Newport filtered cigarettes, Marlboro, Camel, Basic and Doral. What that means is, the pushers put more dope in their cigarettes to get people hooked.
COLMES: Where is the social conscience of these people?
MORRIS: They’re murderers, absolutely murderers.
COLMES: Unbelievable.
HANNITY: You know, Dick? Can I just stop you, for your own — they’re not murderers. People make choices.
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: Hold on, Sean.
(CROSSTALK)
COLMES: This is my time. You’ll be up in a second. Let me get my line of questions here.
HANNITY: I’m saving him from a lawsuit.
MORRIS: Sue me, 400,000 dead, including my mother, and my mother-in- law, and my father-in-law.
COLMES: Right. Now, let’s talk about student loans. What’s the issue here?
MORRIS: Well, there, you read all this publicity, which is wonderful, about how students go to their college aid officers and say, “Where can I get a loan?” And the college aid officer says, “Oh, this company,” but doesn’t reveal that the college is getting a kickback on the loan from the company. So Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general in New York state, is prosecuting that.
But what nobody has written about is you can get a student loan for 1 point less in interest over the life of the loan, 1 point a year less, from the federal government. Bill Clinton set up this direct-lending program that was terrific. But Congress, because of the special interests that wanted to lend the money, particularly a crag called Sally Mae, which is the biggest lender, passed a law saying, “You can’t band private lending.”
So anybody who takes a student loan from anybody other than the federal government is an idiot. You’re paying 1 percent more per year on the loan. And then Congress, having required private student loans stay in existence, exempted student loans from the bankruptcy bill so you can never get it forgiven. And, they said, you can’t refinance and lower the rate, so the only form of financing you can’t refinance.
HANNITY: Dick, there’s nobody that can read this book and not come away with the same passion that I had reading it, and that is, it goes right to the title, “Outrage,” about government and how it’s failing the American people on many, many…
MORRIS: It’s a manual for that, 800 footnotes.
HANNITY: It’s a manual for — and also the United Nations, and you go into a lot of details here. Here’s my question. How does this impact the electorate going into the election, if people were to become aware of the level of corruption that you’re describing?
MORRIS: Well, I worked very hard with my wife in this book at naming names. We have every congressman and the earmarks they put in. We have every member of Senate and House and the relatives they have as lobbyists and the relatives they have on the payroll. And we have an action agenda of who not to vote for.
A very cute story that will endear you. When FDR was in the New York State Senate, he noticed an item for $381 a bridge over Wappinger’s Creek, and he said, “What’s that item?” And the head of the Senate said, “That’s in your district.” And he said, “I think we should have it returned to the state treasury. We don’t need that.” And the head of the Senate said, “You should have your head examined.”
Fast forward to 2005. Hillary Clinton gets an earmark for $800,000 for the National Woman’s Hall of Fame, into which she is inducted a year after she got the grant.
HANNITY: All right. Now, I have not asked you this question and not got you on the record — and we do this every election — if you were to predict today who was going to be the candidate for the Republicans, who’s going to be the ticket for the Republicans, ticket for the Democrats?
MORRIS: Hillary and Obama.
HANNITY: I agree.
MORRIS: Against Rudy, and I hope, if the Republicans have half a brain, Condi Rice.
HANNITY: You want Condi. But Condi says she’s not going to do it.
MORRIS: They all talk in the end. There’s no person in the world that says they want to be — Nelson Rockefeller said, “I never wanted to be vice president of anything until the day he was appointed.”
HANNITY: What about Fred Thompson? How does Fred Thompson do?
MORRIS: Well, I think that Fred Thompson has a real problem in Arthur Branch, who’s going to beat him.
HANNITY: His character.
MORRIS: Arthur Branch is the character he plays on “Law and Order.” He’s sexier. He has more hair. He’s better looking.
HANNITY: Wait, where do you get this, has more hair? They put hair on him?
MORRIS: The angles. He’s more glib. He’s wiser. He’s got better quotes. Fred is not going to look well in comparison to Arthur.
HANNITY: Now, I’ve got to get this last question in. Putting you on record early, who — I think the Republicans will win the election, because the Democrats are now so positioned left, and I think it will be very hard for them to overcome that. Agree or disagree?
MORRIS: Disagree. Hillary will be the next president.
HANNITY: Hillary’s going to be the president?
MORRIS: But let’s all work to try to stop it.
HANNITY: You really believe that?
COLMES: No, let’s all work to try to make what’s best for the country happen, and get out of this war in Iraq, something Hillary will do before Rudy will.
MORRIS: You know what?
HANNITY: Hillary changes her mind every second.
MORRIS: Hillary will not withdraw from Iraq. Hillary will — as a woman, she will not want that record.
COLMES: We will talk about that, I’m sure, the next time you’re on the program. We thank Dick Morris. The book is “Outrage.”
HANNITY: Congratulations on the book.
MORRIS: Thank you.
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