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July 17, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
July 17, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yeah, I'm going to talk about it.
In fact, I have a lot to say about this stupid stunt that this brave and courageous Senate is pulling tonight, this all-nighter.
Everybody's talking about caffeine and cots and all this and what I'm concerned.
You look at the average age of these guys.
They're going to need a bunch of port-a-potties if they're going to pull this off.
And I don't know that anybody's made any allowances for that.
Greetings, my good friends, and welcome to the only place you need to be, the EIB network, and Rush Limboy here as your real anchor man, truth detector, and doctor of democracy for three full hours.
800-282-2882 is the number.
If you'd like to be on the program, the email address, rush at EIBNet.com.
Just got this story.
Story just cleared the wires.
Actually, it didn't clear the wires.
It's from a website called theAge.com.
Global Warming.
And I'm not sure this may be a spoof.
It's a spoof.
It's too bad.
I think if it's a spoof, you know, all good comedy requires truth.
Now, the headline of this thing, global warming now world's most boring topic.
It is.
You can't?
That's the thing.
Well, global warming, the debate over whether man-made carbon gas emissions are having a detrimental influence on climate change, has been ranked as the most boring topic of conversation on earth, according to a new report.
Here, it's a spoof.
I'm just teasing you, but it's funny.
The issue of global warming far outperformed other contenders for the title, such as the production of goat cheese, the musical genius of the artist formerly known as P. Diddy, and media speculation over the likely outcomes of the upcoming federal election.
Global warming.
It's true.
It's getting to be boring.
That's actually not good.
I mean, if people are going to tune it out, they're not going to stay vigilant against it.
It's probably going to become boring because we're not going to let it become boring on this program.
We don't let anything we talk about become boring, so it will not be.
Here's our final iPhone winner.
And it's Angela C. of Lexington, North Carolina.
She listens raptly on WSJS AM600 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Now, the iPhone giveaway is over, ladies and gentlemen.
But here at the EIB Network, our largesse never ends.
We still have the Allen Brothers rush packs that we give away every Friday.
We're doing this all summer long on the website.
The best steaks you've ever tasted.
Bar none.
You can't get this stuff in restaurants.
And we have other plans, other giveaway plans that we're working feverishly on, but we can't disclose them yet.
So anyway, congratulations to Angela C., the iPhone winner.
She gets the iPhone.
She gets a check from us for two years' service at AT ⁇ T, full year subscription to the Limbaugh Letter, and the website plus the $100 gift card from Bocajava.com.
I think this needs to be noted for historical purposes.
On October 7th of 2002, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, having been battered by the ClintonGore.com crash and the aftermath of 9-11 damage and fear and pessimism, October 2nd, 7th of 2002, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 7,181.
That's less than 7,200 for those of you in Rio Linda.
Today, less than five years from October 7th of 2002, the Dow all but doubled.
It did cross 14,000 today.
It got back just under 14,000, but it crossed 14,000 today, a humongously huge story that is not being reported at all because it doesn't fit the action line or the template of the drive-by media that the economy is bad.
There are four points worth noting about this.
One, the Bush economic plan.
Have you ever heard those words, by the way?
You don't.
The Bush economic plan worked and it worked brilliantly.
Number two, the so-called drive-by media never reported, never celebrated, nor did it endorse the Bush economic plan, making it the only state secret that's not leaked to the liberal media.
Nobody is leaking to the media how good the economy is.
Number three, if we need fairness and balance in equal time, we don't need it with talk radio.
We need it with liberal media because this is another one of these great stories that's not being reported anywhere but here.
And of course, the liberal intelligentsia learns nothing from this and clings to their depression model for governance.
All of these Democrats running around on their poverty tours one way or the other, populist tours.
The country's falling apart.
Everybody's a paycheck away from being homeless.
Soup lines are everywhere.
It's a message of doom, gloom, defeatism, and yet there is good news all over that is not being reported.
General Peter Pace, and this is in Time magazine, in his most optimistic remarks since the U.S. troop buildup began, General Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said today that Iraq has undergone a sea change in security in recent months, and this will influence his recommendation to President Bush on how long to continue the current strategy of the surge.
After conferring with Major General Walter Gaskin and other commanders in Ramadi, which is a provincial capital west of Baghdad, General Pace told reporters he has gathered a positive picture of the security environment, not only here, but also in Baghdad, where he began his visit last Monday.
Pace, all over.
This is an amazing story.
This kind of optimism is they'd be very, very careful about distorting or exaggerating this.
And so, as I said yesterday, I would much rather, we had a story from Major General Rick Lynch, who commands the third ID yesterday, New York Times, I'd much rather listen to him.
And I'd much rather listen to General Pace and believe what they say they are there than to listen to Jim Webb or Harry Reid or any of these other Democrats who are trying to secure defeat.
Senate Democrats said yesterday they would keep the Senate in session through the night tonight in an effort to highlight Republican resistance to allowing a simple majority vote on a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq.
It's going to be an all-night session.
Nothing will be accomplished, ladies and gentlemen, to go with eight months of Democrat Congress where nothing has been accomplished other than the minimum wage.
The Senate Democrats are all upset that the Iraqi parliament's taking a summer recess.
We're in the middle of a war.
How can they do this?
We're in the middle of a war.
And here we've got stunts and nothing being done by our own legislature, our own Congress.
Nothing but stunts, nothing but investigations, nothing but harassment, nothing of substance.
And they have been on vacation all summer.
The only difference is I love it when they go on vacation.
When they go on vacation, nothing gets done.
And that's one of the best things that can happen to the country is when they're in session or when there is gridlock.
This is a taxpayer-forced and are funded, I should say, publicity stunt that's going to happen tonight.
And if you look, there's a big story in the Politico about how this thing all came about.
And it's very clear that the Democrats are now so completely beholden to the appeasement left, these kooks on the internet, that they're putting on this show for them.
They're putting on this show for the moveon.orgs and for the other things like that.
And those organizations are actually running this.
Schumer is talking to them.
Reed's talking.
They care what these people say and think.
And these people are actually yanking the change of the Democrats who are making this happen.
And the enemy's going to be watching this as well, by the way.
It's going to be on television.
And the enemy will be watching it as well.
It's a complete farce.
There is nothing they can do to end this war short of cutting off funding.
And they don't have the votes to cut off funding.
And they don't have the votes to cut off funding because the American people don't want the war ended in this way.
In fact, Rasmussen has a poll out now.
He just came out this morning.
51% of the American people say, let the thing go through September.
There's no reason to stop it here in July.
Let this thing go.
Let the plan, the surge go as it was intended, and wait for the reports in September.
The Democrats, of course, will ignore this poll.
They don't have the votes to cut off funding because they don't have the support of the American people to cut off funding.
If the American people were really as opposed to all this as the Democrats say they are, it would be easy to cut off funding.
This whole thing tonight should be bought and paid for, funded by the Democrat National Committee.
But the good news is this.
The American people are going to look at this.
The Democrat Congress's poll numbers are going to plummet even further.
Well, I say they're going to look at this.
They might.
Because there's nothing but reruns on television.
I'm going to urge people to just take a peek at this tonight.
Not watch the whole thing.
Record it.
TiVo it, DVR it, VCR it, whatever, and save this and show your kids.
Show your kids and your grandkids what a worthless bunch of Democrats we had in the United States Senate in the year and summer of 2007.
Take a sneak peek at it.
It'll be on C-SPAN 2.
What else you got to do?
And the sun's going to be going all night.
You know, when you get up to go to the bathroom, click on the TV.
And as you walk to the bathroom, in fact, put a TV in the bathroom.
When you're in the bathroom, watch what's going on because the difference in your toilet and on the Florida Senate will not be recognizable.
All right, got to make a small little correction here, ladies and gentlemen.
I indicted the entire drive-by media for ignoring this great economy and, of course, the performance of the stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
It has been brought to my attention that today on, what was it, The Today Show, the correspondent from CNBC, Erin Burnett, did a report on the economy.
And here's a montage of what she said.
Now, keep in mind, I don't want you to faint here.
This did appear on NBC on the Today Show.
You know, it's an amazing thing here.
We're looking at the Dow Jones industrial average up 30% over the past six months, 30 days this year alone.
We have had record closes for that index.
So it's really another day, another record on Wall Street.
It's also worth noting that while politicians talk about two Americas, virtually all Americans are seeing wages rise, and unemployment is at an historic low.
The issue of taxes is important here.
The top 1% of Americans pay 30% of taxes in this country.
The bottom 20% of American wage earners pay only 5%.
Now, those of you that listen to this program regularly and visit my website regularly know all that.
That's not news.
Do you realize people that watch the Today Show, how many of them heard that?
That is news to them?
How well the stock market's doing without criticizing the usual line, but the women and minorities hardest hit, the poor being left out, it's just not fair.
It's doing so.
None of that was in there.
And then the tax rates and who is paying what in this country.
And this reference here to politicians talk about two Americas, a reference to the Brett girl out there.
So my apologies, and I'm giving at a girl here to CNBC correspondent Erin Burnett, probably now ruining her career because I have praised her.
That will cause the others in the drive-by to question her loyalty to the cause.
National intelligence estimate was released this morning.
Francis Townsend had a big press conference.
I'm watching it.
And it was fascinating, and it is fascinating to contrast this NIE with previous NIEs.
Last time that they released a national intelligence estimate, it talked about all kinds of horrible things that were lurking out there.
And the drive-bys ate it up.
And the Democrats pounced on it, and they ate it up.
And say, Bush is failing.
This is not working.
We're going about this the wrong way.
We've got an NIE out there today that is being totally ignored by the drive-by media because it attests to the ongoing abilities of al-Qaeda, that they are now even in Iran.
Al-Qaeda has leadership in Iran, and they are staging operations out of Iran into Iraq.
It also states that Iraq is now the full-fledged headquarters of Al-Qaeda, even though they are mounting and building up strength once again in Pakistan.
In fact, let's go to the soundbites two and three here because this, just to give you NBC's flavor of this, this is also on the Today Show.
Meredith Vieira talked with Andrea Mitchell.
And she said, Andrea, what's new in this report?
What is new is that the report will say that the al-Qaeda threat will be persistent and evolving over the next three years, and that Al-Qaeda and its imitators will continue to try to attack the U.S. homeland.
In particular, Meredith, the report says Al-Qaeda is franchising its operations and is as active as at any time since 9-11.
But contrary to erroneous leaks last week, the report does not say that al-Qaeda is more of a threat now than it was before the attacks on 9-11.
Next question.
Well, we've spent billions of dollars, obviously, in Homeland Security.
Has it been for nothing based on this report?
Has it done anything to keep al-Qaeda out of here?
In fact, Meredith, this report will say that the nation is safer now, that worldwide efforts since 9-11 have indeed prevented attacks on the homeland and made the terror group realize that it is harder to attack the United States than it was before 9-11.
And that is why.
They're conflicting news in this for the drive-bys because, and the Democrat Party, because any report, and by the way, the NIE is something that the Democrats love.
Remember, the NIE is an association of intelligence agencies and independent groups to get together and come up with this report.
And the Democrats have always relied on it for credibility, and they've highly touted it.
Democrats are in a position now of trying to convince this country that we don't face a threat.
And the only threat that we really face is George W. Bush not getting out of Iraq.
And if George Bush won't get out of Iraq, then we're going to have more and more terrorists that hate us.
We had no terrorists that hated us before Iraq.
It's all Bush's fault.
Now here comes the NIE talking about how dangerous al-Qaeda is and how big they have rebuilt and so forth, while the Democrats are in the midst of trying to say there's nothing to be at war here about.
While Edwards is saying it's a bumper sticker slogan.
The Democrats are trying to convince as many people as possible that we are not at war, that we don't face enemies, that these hostilities are strictly related to the hatred the world has for George W. Bush.
Then on the other hand, other parts of the report say it's harder for them to attack here.
We know it is because they haven't.
It's been six years, and they haven't hit us.
And no doubt that they've tried, no information on how many times they've been stopped and shut down.
Can't ever broadcast and make public your success stories on things like that.
But it hasn't happened.
So what's been done right?
This is a pretty favorable report, and that's why you're not seeing a lot of interviews on TV right now.
You're not seeing a lot of analysis of this.
You're not seeing a lot of hand-wringing and the usual reaction.
Had the news in this thing been something that Democrats could use.
I'm telling you, they're in the process here of doing it again, like they did in 2002, the Wellstone Memorial.
They're doing it again.
They're walking into a door, but they haven't opened it first.
They're opening a door and it's hitting them right in the face and it's bloodying up their noses in the middle of all of this.
The success in the surge.
Now we've had two members of the military, one, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, attest to it in his most optimistic report since the surge began and probably in a couple years in Iraq.
On the security side, we have another general that said yes yesterday in the New York Times.
And the Democrats are in the process of trying to lose the war.
At the time, this is working.
They try to do everything they can to shackle the president and the Republicans with this defeat.
It is a pure political move, and it's what they're doing.
It's going to backfire like everything else that they have done.
The American people are going to see this for what it is, folks.
It's a game that the Democrats are playing politics and everything else with this war and the lives of those who are fighting it.
It's going to backfire on them, as has everything else that they have done.
They're so obsessed with pleasing these left-wing loons, they are turning off the general public.
Why do you think that congressional approval numbers are as low as they are?
Don't tell if the American people believed as the Democrats believe they do on Iraq, the numbers of approval would be skyrocketing.
And don't think that the American people are upset because they didn't get the immigration bill done.
And don't think they're upset because they haven't built a new dam someplace.
And don't think the American people are upset because they haven't passed legislation.
The American people do not look at Washington and measure success by the numbers of pieces of legislation that get passed up there.
They look and they see how these people behave on television and what they say.
And the Democrats are front and center on camera.
You can't find a Republican there unless they're a moderate Republican trying to, they're operating totally out of fear right now.
This is a do-nothing good Congress.
And they're making it official every day.
These senators are going to talk and talk and talk tonight.
Despite all the talk, despite the all-night session, you will not hear a single detailed, workable strategy by the Democrats or some of the Republican in name onlys up there for winning the war on terrorism or even fighting it.
You will not hear anything optimistic.
You will not hear about American exceptionalism.
You will not hear anything that gives the troops a morale boost.
You'll hear nothing of the sort.
And it's typical of what they've been doing, and it's going to come back and bite them once again.
You watch.
Well, this is interesting.
Elizabeth Edwards is unloaded on Hillary Clinton again.
This was unloaded again, this time on Hillary Clinton.
It's in Salon.
And Elizabeth Edwards basically says that Hillary is behaving like a man.
And she's not doing enough for women.
She says she's doing things for women, but she's not enough of a woman doing things for women.
She's trying to be more like a man in politics.
And then she really calls her.
What excites her abortion speech in which Hillary said abortion should be something, something in rare.
And of course, that's against the liberal orthodoxy.
This is Hillary trying to move to the center, you know, some time ago in her long ago planned presidential bid.
But Elizabeth Edwards said, sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's issues.
I'm not convinced she'd be as good an advocate for women as her husband, John Edwards.
She needs a rationale greater for her campaign than I have heard.
And then she says that Obama needs the same thing, a greater rationale for his campaign than she has heard.
Did you just have to laugh when I shouldn't say?
Well, you just have to laugh when Elizabeth Edwards calls out Hillary for not acting like a man, unlike her husband.
And I don't want to go any further than that.
Let's just leave it at that.
I find the whole thing comical.
I just wonder, you know, if she's off on her own here, if she's off the reservation or if this has been programmed and she's out there at the gay pride parade in San Francisco and she's, oh, yeah, gay marriage, all for it.
Her husband, the candidate, doesn't agree with that.
I don't know if she's out there, you know, doing these things on her own without any coordination or if the campaign's sending her out there with these messages with this too.
You don't know.
The odds are everything's scripted.
The odds are with these two, everything's with most Democrats, too.
If they ever start freelancing an ad living, it's over.
Because that's when the mask comes off.
Now, back to this little charade tonight in the Senate.
I was serious when I said earlier I want to encourage each of you to record the Senate's all-night session just so you can have it for your kids and grandkids so they can one day know, ladies and gentlemen, which senators are responsible for the genocide that will ensue in Iraq if Harry Reid and his party wins the day.
Just so they will know which senators surrendered and refused to back the troops in the field.
Just so they can know which senators freed al-Qaeda from the battlefield so they could slaughter Americans here at home.
Just so they can know which senators didn't have the will to win the Battle of Iraq and forced us to go back to the region to finish the job some other time when your kids and grandkids grow up, costing us far more lives.
I want future generations to know which of these politicians deserves to be condemned for eternity because the drive-by media is not going to report it that way.
The drive-by media is all excited about this because once again, Bush is being savaged.
And these senators are being given marching.
Actually, a Democrats are sending marching orders out to themselves, little memos.
This whole thing tonight is attack Bush, attack Bush, attack Bush.
And that's what this is.
That's why this is nothing more than a television commercial disguised as Senate debate.
The DNC ought to be paying for it.
And you ought to take a moment to look at some of it so that you know what actually happened.
The bottom line is this.
Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats want to hang Bush and the Republicans with a loss in Iraq because they see that as their ticket to the White House in a congressional majority for their own version of eternity.
And they're going to use this.
If they can ever secure this defeat before Bush leaves the White House, they will use it to label the Republicans incompetent on national security.
Every negative consequence of a loss in Iraq will be said to have been the result of Republican war mismanagement.
The Democrats will say, we had to get us out.
It was going so bad, we had to get our country out of that.
We knew we were going to have to fight these people another day, but we have a smarter way to do it.
This administration, the Republicans, are horrible at national security, are horrible at using the military.
This is what they want to set up.
They think that they can insulate themselves from being weak on defense by imposing a loss on Bush and by blaming the loss on Bush and blaming every single subsequent attack on Bush and Republican failures and mistakes.
And make no mistake, if al-Qaeda does hit before we get out of Iraq, anytime they hit, doesn't matter.
If we hit and get another attack in this country, Bush did it.
Bush's fault.
Mismanagement caused by being in Iraq.
We Democrats tried to warn you, blah, blah, blah.
They will politicize even that.
They might come together for a day and lament the loss and share the sorrow and so forth.
They wouldn't be able to help themselves.
It would be less than a week before they would be out there blaming Bush and Iraq for this.
And this is their long-term strategy, folks.
Twist everything with their help, their allies in the drive-by media, twist everything so that they are seen as strong and competent on national security while Bush and the Republicans blundered.
And they do this because they know that that's the exact opposite truth.
They are the ones weak on national security.
They are the ones incompetent.
They are the ones that are seen as uninterested in it.
They're the ones seen as trying to secure defeat.
I don't think they get it.
I think their ego and their arrogance is such that when they go on TV and speak, because of all these years of having a media monopoly on their side, they think that their words are accepted as gospel.
I don't think they learned much from the immigration debate.
All they learned from that was, got to keep secrets in the American people.
And they resent you.
You're not supposed to have been able to do what you did in shaping the outcome of that particular piece of legislation.
So they think that you're not smart enough to see that they are the ones that are securing defeat.
They don't think you're smart enough to understand that they are the ones who are trying to engineer a humiliating defeat for the United States for the simple purpose of pinning the loss on Bush.
I've long been saying this, and I've been saying it as a theory, but I see it much more acutely now.
It is crystal clear to me what these people are doing.
It's also crystal clear to me that they're tone deaf.
It is crystal clear to me that their arrogance and condescension is such that it prevents them from seeing the mistake that they're making.
Here we are in the middle of the surge.
It's working.
The boots on the ground, everybody that's talking about saying, and the Democrats are not disputing these reports, by the way.
From General Pace, yesterday, the New York Times, Rick Lynch, Major General Rick Lynch, Democrats, maybe they might tonight.
It'll be interesting to see.
But so far, they haven't disputed any of this.
They're just ignoring it.
And they're trying to create false news with the help of their buddies in the drive-by media that it's all falling apart.
It's so bad, we can't wait.
We have to get out now.
What I want you to know is the only reason we have to get out now is because if it's working, and this, by the way, the NIE and these two statements from the two military guys in the past two days, worst news the Democrats could have heard.
That's why they're doing this all night of tonight.
That's why they're hoping it gets covered the way they want it covered.
Bash Bush, blame Bush, try to overwhelm the report of the surge being successful with another all-nighter of drumbeating, doom and gloom, negative Bush bashing, knowing full well the drive-bys are going to amplify it and cover it.
Here's the point.
Iraq will be a Bush and Republican loss, even though the Democrats will have forced it, if they succeed.
If they succeed, somewhere down the road the next year and a half.
And, you know, they're peeling off these Republican moderates.
I'll give a little story on that as the program unfolds today.
So far, they don't have the votes to cut off funding.
And I don't think that they would ever do it if they did have the votes.
I think it certainly wouldn't.
It wouldn't be veto proof.
But this defeat, this theoretical defeat that they're seeking and all the horror that will flow from it will be laid at the Republicans' feet.
I'm telling you what this is.
This is about one thing, and it's about building a Democrat agenda, political agenda, for the next 25 years.
They're not going to lose the House again like they did in 95.
They're not going to go through 14 years in the wilderness.
It's not going to happen.
And they're not going to lose the Senate.
That's not going to happen.
So they're setting all this up.
They gave it a shot with immigration.
That was a comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act of 2007.
Staved it off.
But these people are relentless.
Their weakest point has been national security.
They intend to manipulate the war effort to, in their minds, fix that.
So while embracing surrender and the anti-war movement and undermining the war, they expect to come out of this as the National Security Party.
And they can only do that with the help of the drive-by media and securing a loss.
But I don't even think they can pull that off.
I don't think there is any way that they can be seen as strong on national security, given the rhetoric and the votes and the way they have behaved in the first six and a half months of this Congress.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
Now, let's see.
As far as the Democrat presidential field is concerned, Barack Obama is not black enough.
Hillary Clinton is not woman enough.
And the Brett girl is the Brett girl.
Pretty soon somebody's going to say, he's not man enough.
And then they're going to say about Chris Dodd, he's not.
It's funny to watch these people.
Not black enough, not woman enough, and not man enough.
And we're talking about the three frontrunners.
By the way, this two Americas business, you notice all the money these Democrats are raising?
Hillary and Obama, 30 million each or something.
If there's two Americas, it must be – it's the hypocrisy of these people.
They're raising money like crazy.
I don't know from who, but it certainly isn't from poor people.
I wonder if Edwards passed the hat down there in New Orleans on the poverty tour.
Steve in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we start with you on the phones.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Rush, it's a great pleasure to speak to you.
I'm a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer, and I would like to thank you for all you do for the folks still in uniform.
Thank you, sir.
It's reciprocated.
Thanks.
And I think your comment about recording the all-night love fest tonight is a great idea.
I think we need to record for posterity everything that the Democrats say the next year to use for basically information for the 08 election cycle.
Not only that, but for people, you know, we record a lot of this stuff, obviously, for use in our audio soundbites.
We have a tremendous archive of this stuff, and we go back to the archives and we play it.
And the best thing you can do when you're trying to describe people to other people is use those people.
Use their voice.
Here is what Dashel said.
Here's what Ted Kennedy said.
Here's what Harry Reid said.
And then you play it.
I think people ought to tune in.
I do think they ought to watch this, especially since the Democrats are so eager for each other to watch it.
I want to make a prediction, though, because these people are smart.
They're sly.
At the opening of this thing tonight, whenever it is, or at some point in prime time when they think the viewership will be at its peak, you're going to get a riff from these Democrats on how great our soldiers are and what a great job they've been doing, how impossible it has been given the incompetence of the commander-in-chief.
But they're going to try to take a swipe at this notion that they don't support the troops.
And you're going to get sick listening to the hypocrisy of these people who before tonight have done nothing to raise their morale.
In fact, they've done everything they can to destroy it.
But you will hear that tonight.
They'll try to tackle some of these things or professing their support for the troops.
And that's why we want to get them out.
We want our troops to be safe.
That's why we want to pull them out.
They're in a meaningless, unjust war.
It's being mismanaged by Bush and the Republicans.
Blah, They won't be able to do that for long.
They will revert to who they are, and you'll get your daily dose of doom and gloom, defeatism, and pessimism from it.
Jerry in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Hello, sir.
Good morning, Rush.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Let's get straight to it.
The source of the controversy is the Democrat Congress who's proposing to raise a tax on cigars to $10 per cigar.
Yes.
To raise $35 to $50 billion for state children's health insurance.
Right.
It's for the children.
It's for the children.
In the name of saving the children.
Big government has targeted yet another industry to destroy.
So the Winston Churchill that I just started smoking cigars with is going to go from $10 to $20 each.
Oh, I know.
The maximum cigar tax will be $10 a cigar.
It's now at $0.05.
The cigar industry as a percentage of the whole tobacco industry is like 2%.
If that, this cigar tax increase is sort of hidden in you.
Well, it's not hidden anymore, but the bill is written to make it look like it's really a tax that's targeted on cigarettes.
The tax on cigarettes will go up to $1 a pack or go up $1 a pack from what it is now.
And the cigar thing is even worse.
$0.05 to $10 to pay for kids' health care.
Cigars have long been ignored as a source of revenue because compared to cigarettes and other tobacco products, there aren't that many of them sold.
Somebody has figured out here that there's a whole lot of money to be made.
Children's health care were all, I thought the tobacco settlements and all the taxes now were being funded or were used and being directed to children's health care programs.
I guess this is children's insurance.
There's also, and I'm not sure about this, the markup on this bill is still happening, but I think in addition to the $10 a cigar tax, which is going to put these people out of business, it will literally be like the thing they did on the yachts raising the luxury tax.
It'll put these people out of business.
People will be going elsewhere to find cigars.
They'll find them.
They'll find a way to do them and find a way to get them to avoid paying this U.S. tax.
But I think, I'm still checking this out.
In addition to the per stick tax, manufacturers, as of January of 08 next year, if this thing becomes law, are going to have a 50% tax on their current inventory that's on the floor in the warehouse before it gets to the retailers.
Now, I'm still checking this, but this is one of the bullet points that I got from somebody who analyzed the bill.
If a cigar company has a million dollars in inventory cigars, then before those cigars can leave for retail, $500,000 to the United States Treasury.
In addition to the, and this is Democrats, folks.
This is who they are.
I was telling somebody about this last night, and they said, why are they doing this?
I said, the Democrats.
They raise taxes.
His friend said, no, this is aimed at you.
You're the best-known cigar smoker in the country.
This is the limbaugh tax.
It's more than that.
These people are trying to put the tobacco business out of business without doing it via legislation under the guise of doing it for the children.
This is what liberalism is.
This is what Democrats do.
They target businesses that they don't like and they use government to harm them, maybe even destroy them.
Back.
Hi, welcome back.
What does the Modern Democrat Party stand for, folks?
I can tell you.
Subpoenas, surrender, and censorship.
The new slogans of the Modern Democrat Party.
Quick timeout.
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