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Dec. 4, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:28
December 4, 2008, Thursday, Hour #3
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Time Text
And greetings and welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Rush Limbaugh, the fastest week in media.
Can you believe this is already Thursday?
I know it's been a long week for you because I haven't been here, but it has zipped my great to have you with us, 800-282-2882, if you want to be on the program.
The email address is lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Now, I saw today on the Bloomberg Newswire that the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, has decided that he needs to do something now about home prices.
He needs to do something about getting people into houses.
You know, Phil Graham said something back during the campaign.
Of course, McCain zapped him for it.
But what did he say?
He said, we're a nation of whiners.
People whining.
You know what?
I never thought that this would happen.
I thought that there was an innate toughness and an understanding of history by people in our country.
But I think we're not a nation of whiners.
But man, there are enough people in this country who are.
And we have leaders who are willing to pander to them.
I guess the idea of America now is that you never, it's not just you don't suffer pain.
You don't suffer any discomfort.
If there is any discomfort, why the government has to come in and fix it.
The government has to come in and alleviate your suffering and pain.
And we have too many politicians of both parties who are willing and able to run in there as fast as they can to try to take credit for doing that.
It is shocking.
And yet, while all this so-called pain and suffering is going on, we keep hearing people say Great Depression 2.
We don't have anybody alive in this country who understands what the Great Depression really was.
And this is nothing like it.
This is fat city compared to the Great Depression.
And yet, okay, so the housing market's in a slump and this market's in a slump and this market said, oh, we can't allow.
We've got to bail them out.
We've got to bail them out.
We can't have any pain.
We can't have any suffering.
I guess the days of tough love are gone.
You know, thank you, baby boomers.
So the Treasury Secretary says, well, that's what we're going to do.
We're going to make sure that home mortgage interest rates are 4.5%.
Did you see that?
Okay.
So what we have now is price fixing in the mortgage industry.
They've already bollocksed this once or twice with Fami Mae and Freddie Mac.
Are we going to learn from it?
No.
We're going to have the Treasury Czar fix prices now.
Central planning.
That's what I'm going to start calling the federal government.
Because that's what's happening here, my good friends.
Central planning says that 4.5% mortgage rates are good for America.
Now, if central planning says that 4.5% mortgage rates are good for America, and they're probably either today or tomorrow going to say that $25 billion is a good bailout number for the big three automakers, where is central planning going to stop?
Central planning going to require Americans to submit term papers saying how they will save money and that their next car will get 30 miles per gallon and will be made by UAW workers if they get the 4.5% mortgage?
Is central planning going to say, okay, you want a 4.5% mortgage?
You must sign an agreement that man-made global warming is killing us and that a tax on carbon will save the planet and that you will eagerly pay it in exchange for your 4.5% mortgage.
Is central planning going to say you must sign an agreement on tax increases who makes anything any more than you do?
Is central planning going to say, you must sign an agreement that you will vote for and support socialized medicine in exchange for your 4.5% mortgage?
And by the way, if you have a private jet, you will not qualify for a 4.5% mortgage.
Well, if central planning starts saying you don't need this and you don't need that, then we're screwed.
Central planning means the federal government.
If you don't, you don't need a tax increase or you don't need a tax cut right now.
You don't need that third car.
You don't need it.
All this is going to be done for our benefit.
Don't misunderstand.
New jobless claims.
This is the AP.
Every month when they report the numbers, new jobless claims drop unexpectedly.
The new claims for jobless benefits fell unexpectedly last week, but the number of people continuing to receive government aid reached a 26-year high, and large companies announced more job cuts today.
Unexpectedly.
Why is economic news unexpected?
It doesn't matter what the economic news is, it's always unexpected.
November, I mentioned this in the early part of the program.
You might have thought it was a throwaway.
November, this is from the Charlotte Observer.
November was the coldest in 32 years.
What's ahead?
This weekend's raw, chilly weather brought an end to one of the coldest Novembers in Charlotte weather history.
It doesn't necessarily mean we're in store for a brutal winter, but temperatures this week will feel colder than typical early December weather.
And it wasn't just in Charlotte.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center is calling the Carolinas' winter temperature forecast a toss-up.
Equal chances of normal, above normal, or below normal.
In other words, they have no clue.
It's just a wild guess.
By the way, snurdy, little pop quiz here.
Can you tell me which federal agency is in charge of the weather?
Which federal agency is in charge of forecasting the weather?
Who?
Yeah, which there's no, but there's a cabinet-level position as a cabinet-level agency, and Obama has nominated the person to head up this agency.
Which one is its primary job?
Over half of its budget is forecasting the weather.
Commerce.
Kid, you're the Commerce Department.
Bill Richardson is now the weather czar.
The Commerce Department, the vast majority of their budget goes to weather forecasting, which crucial.
It is fundamental to American.
Did you see the movie Trading Places?
Dan Aykroyd, and well, you see how the Florida citrus crop could be manipulated so that the Duke brothers could try to corner them.
I'm in they forecast the weather.
They run NASA, not NASA.
They run NOAA and all of the weather forecasting agents, the satellites that do all this stuff, National Hurricane Center.
That's the Commerce Department.
And they just said they have no clue what the winner's going to be for North Carolina.
We'll be back in just a second.
Just checking out something here, folks, that I just received from our official climatologist, Roy Spencer.
And he's right.
Look at it.
Lawyers, this is from the UK Telegraph.
Lawyers call for international court for the environment.
Meaning that leftist lawyers could represent the environment and sue us.
So, for example, trees could, like, do you have a fireplace on you burn real logs?
Well, if you did, some lawyer could go get some trees and sue you for destroying relatives.
U.S. newspaper ad sales fall a yeah, we you all you can do is laugh at this, but this is this is there's no stopping this stuff.
What those idiots in Peru just gave the environment constitutional rights down there?
Remember that we're a world of wusses, a world of absolute sissy wusses, and nobody's got the guts to stand up to any of these little imps.
In the meantime, Al-Qaeda and whoever else is going nuts this time in India, making plans all over the world.
U.S. newspaper advertising revenue collapsed by nearly $2 billion or 18% in the third quarter.
According to the Newspaper Association of America, even online ad revenue made a small U-turn for the second quarter in a row.
$2 billion.
Do you think the Congress might want to consider bailing out newspapers?
Where does it stop?
Ken in Decatur, Alabama.
I'm glad you called, sir.
You're up next in the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Keyno's Rush from Alabama, the reddest state in America.
Thank you, sir.
Rush, I just want to comment about your talking earlier about the automobile industry in Alabama.
Yeah.
I am in industrial sales, and I call on all of those Alabama automobile manufacturers, including the three General Motors plants here that are scheduled for closing next year.
And based on that, I needed a new vehicle.
I drive a 99 Chevrolet pickup truck with 250,000 miles on it.
And today, I'll be trading it for a new one.
Why?
Well, like the value, like the quality, compared it to all the other vehicles, and made a buyer's decision that that's what I want to drive.
Like you said, the government, everybody's trying to force us into smaller vehicles.
I live in it.
I drive 25,000, 30,000 miles a year.
And safety, comfort, convenience, all those things added up for the money.
I can't beat what I've had in the past and the stay with it.
I'm going to tell you where I've had enough of this.
I mean, I'm very proud of you for doing it.
It's a way to go.
I mean, if you're buying what you want, and that's cool.
But you, you just illustrated the greatest single downfall of the domestic automobile industry, and nobody's talking about it.
Okay.
You know what it is?
I didn't catch it.
Back in the days when I bought my first car and then my second car and my third car, and they were all general mobile, Potiacs, and Buick.
They all broke down in three years.
Had to get a new one.
Then all of a sudden they got quality miners, started making cars to get 250,000 miles.
You didn't need to trade it in after three years.
And so they didn't have to be as innovative because people were keeping cars longer.
If they would have kept making cars that fell apart after three years, none of this would have happened.
True.
True.
Well, thanks, Ken.
I appreciate the phone call.
Here's Yvonne in Wayne, Michigan.
Nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello.
Yeah, I'm hometown of Wayne Assembly for Ford Motor Company.
Yes.
Yeah, and I'm for the bridge loan, and I call it that on purpose.
I feel that the Democrats do believe in trickle-down because we're all suffering from the trickle-down from Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, who has the nerve to sit on the board to discuss whether or not the auto industry gets their bailout when they CYA'd on AIG.
Do you agree or not?
Yeah, CYA on AIG.
Yes.
Because the Democrats are all involved with the triggering mechanism of this whole economic downfall.
I know.
I know.
Well, at least the home mortgage, this whole subprime thing is at the root of so much of this, and they oversaw it.
They brought it to us.
They did everything they could to stop.
And let me tell everybody, I voted for change.
I voted for Dick DeVos back in 06 for governor or 04.
And then Governor Granholm promised we'd be blown away in five years.
And yes, we are.
And guess what?
You guys voted for Democrats, and you're going to end up in the same shoes that Michigan is in right now.
So there you go.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
What kind of shoes is Michigan in here?
Michigan's been downsizing and restructuring.
And I've got to give it to Ford Motor Company who says they may not need the money because my sister and my mother both work there and they have been adding jobs onto their single job for years.
No, no, no.
And laying people off and getting rid of people and offering buyouts.
And they've been afraid for their jobs for at least five years.
So Ford Motor Company has been already retooling and predicting this.
That's why I think out of the three, they're the best off.
And it makes me very angry with this whole horse and pony show that Congress is doing when 61% of the people are against the auto industry bailout.
And yet 71% were against the AIG bailout.
And yet we did that.
So since we did that, guess what?
Right, we did.
We did it to everybody because we were all affected by that.
Did you ever start thinking they listened to you in the first place?
This is all about the continued acquisition of power within the private sector by members of government.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think I can't believe they can sit up there, and I think their faces are red because they must be shamefaced.
They've got to be.
No.
And fine.
You know what?
They're salivating.
They're going to be accountable.
They're salivating.
Your anger.
They wanted this.
They have been hoping for this because they wanted a Democratic president.
Yvonne, your incredulity ought to be aimed at your fellow citizens.
It's your fellow citizens that are sitting out there on their hands.
It's your fellow citizens outside thinking this is all wonderful stuff other than that.
They're afraid to speak out in my town because this is a UAW town.
And my mom, when I got her a McCain sign, was afraid to put it up because the UAW.
No, come on.
You've got to give them the bailout.
They totally centered the union to vote for you for the job.
I know, I understand.
I'm not talking about specifically Michigan in the auto industry.
I'm talking about the fact that you've got people who ought not by rights have ever been lent money for a home being allowed to stay in their homes.
So they're all for the government taking care of them.
You have, wait a minute, you have people at Wall Street banks and so forth who should have gone out of business with the way they ran the business.
They've been bailed out.
They're sitting idly by, happy the government's taking over.
There are way too many Americans happy that the government is getting a nose into as many prices.
I'm not sure how hypothetically think about if the AIG loan had not bailed out because, oh, New York will fail.
Well, they're going to let Michigan fail.
Well, what kind of a trickle-down is it going to have through the economy?
I'm talking rail, trucking, stamping plants, everything, like you said earlier, cows, leather, everything, down to everything.
This will so impact the economy that for them to make our CEOs go through this, when I think that all they would have had to do was carpool on those jets, they didn't have to do the hybrid thing down there.
You know, it just makes me so angry.
And yet, AIG, after they got their bailout, did a $400,000 Spate.
You know, that just makes me angry.
And then if you compare the two, the three CEOs only spent $60,000 compared to $400,000.
Wait a second.
See, you've just nailed something else here.
The AIG bailout.
I'm so surprised at Americans that they are not more angry than they are.
They're all just going to sit back.
While Barack Obama and the Democrats lay this at the doorstep of the Republicans when this is not their fault.
And I'm an independent, and I did happen to lean Republican this time because of fiscal responsibility.
But you know what?
You got what you voted for.
The reason this has happened, the reason this has happened is because the country in too many places has indeed moved left.
And one of the reasons it moved left is because the Republican Party lost its guts and didn't put anybody on the field that could explain alternative ideas so that people had an alternative option to vote for.
We instead got into a competition for who can give out the most government the nicest.
And there's people who are willing to sacrifice a whole lot of freedom and liberty and all that for either security, economic, or whatever otherwise you want to describe it.
But this business, the AIG bailout and these CEOs from the auto companies and their private jets, I have to say something about this.
Because this is systematic of what's wrong with all this.
You know how I know when something is taken off, aside from the fact when it appears on this show.
I was at home, of course, I was trying to keep myself busy because you don't want to just sit there and feel horrible.
And I can't sleep all day.
I mean, I just can't do it.
It's impossible.
So I was trying to keep myself busy.
And all of a sudden, I got a Time magazine.
There's a story on offline backup.
There's a story on backing up your computer offline, how even if you have an external hard drive, it doesn't.
It's a news story.
It's a news story.
And it happened to feature an outfit I've never heard of.
And I said, there's one reason why they're doing this.
They mentioned Carbonite, which is our sponsor.
But I think they do this.
They find who it is that's sponsoring this program and they go out and try to find competitors and build them up.
And that's how I know that Carbonite is kicking butt.
Well, we knew this because they advertise on this program anyway, but they really have started a trend here.
They now have the competitor.
It's not the other guys.
I don't even remember the name of them.
I never heard of them until this story.
And all of a sudden, Carbonite's their competitors.
The other way around.
Carbonite's the big guy here.
And they're getting ready as we turn the calendar year to 2009.
They're going to offer their service for Macintosh.
And it's automatic.
The brilliant thing about backing up your hard drive is that if you leave it up to you to do it manually, you won't do it.
If you can automate it to happen, fine, it'll do it.
But if it happens constantly while you're using your computer, then you never have to worry about it.
And it does.
That's what Carbonite does.
It backs up everything you want it to back up on your hard drive offline.
And if your computer blows up, your hard drive bombs on you, you can recover the data when you get the new hard drive or new computer, and it works.
I've got a bunch of testimonials that came in over Thanksgiving weekend.
People bought the service and they loved it.
It's the best $50 insurance policy you will ever buy.
Log on to carbonite.com and you can try it free for 15 days.
No credit card required to try it.
And you'll be amazed at how simple it is.
And you'll be so thankful when the day comes that your computer blows up on you.
All right.
Gary in Detroit, next up you are on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
How are you today?
Good.
I'll get right to my point.
I'm really upset that these automotive executives have had to apologize to Congress.
I think that most of these congressmen have never run a business in their life.
And these executives are running businesses whose annual revenues exceed most countries in the world.
I don't think that Congress has a clue what they go through every day to keep those companies running.
Yes, they do, because members of Congress are the ones who put the obstacles in front of these guys with these stupid cafe standards, emissions requirements, different formulations for gasoline companies to have to manufacture for different engines.
It's absurd.
I like you, though, sir.
I hate to see them begging.
I hate to see them apologizing to the Politburo.
I hate the cowardice.
I despise all this.
It's like, what did you think when they grounded the corporate jets and drove from Detroit to Washington?
These guys' time is so valuable, they need every minute possible to do what they need to do.
And their time should be protected at all costs.
Now, that's an excellent point.
But here's the problem.
Here's the problem that we face in this country.
And it's really, I'm still undecided as to how firmly implanted and ingrained in our culture, the concept is now.
These guys, I don't know if you know it, but GM, they have an entire corporate flight department.
Folks, do you understand that General Motors has businesses around the world?
They have more than one corporate jet.
They've got a fleet of them.
And they have them in different sizes, different ranges for different purposes, for executives and so forth.
And when they have to have somebody 12 hours away as quickly as they can to handle some aspects of some foreign business, it is the most efficient, the simplest, and the most efficient use of time that you can possibly have.
So what happens?
They take their corporate jets for the first round of bailout hearings, and Harry Reid goes out there and makes some comment about how insensitive that is.
It's the same old-class envy argument.
The amount of money that it costs to fly from Detroit to Washington and back for their meetings and the amount of fuel used is inconsequential to anything.
By driving, they're not going to lower the price of a car.
By driving, they're not going to save the company.
By closing these corporate flight departments, that's only going to last for a while, folks, because they're not going to be able to survive without them.
They have businesses all over the world.
Why?
Folks, that's their business.
You know, they run it the way they see fit.
They've got a lot of obstacles in their way here, but it's not their private jets that put them out of business.
It's not their private jets that are causing them the problem.
And as long as we sit here with this class envy attitude about this, and as long as businesses are forced to play ball by virtue of public relations rather than bottom line, then we have all kinds of problems because the public relations is for who?
Is to keep Congress off their back, to keep central planning off their back.
What is happening here ought to infuriate, not frighten.
It ought to infuriate everybody who has the most basic understanding of the founding of this country and of the Constitution.
None of what's happening here is permitted in the U.S. Constitution.
This is not at all how our country was founded.
And it certainly wasn't founded by cowards who bent over and cowered to a bunch of pompous, arrogant, SOB elected officials.
But rush, but rush, they have so much power, they could put them out of business.
They're in the process of doing it anyway.
Don't we see that?
They put the mortgage business out of business.
The very people that we think are our saviors, they're the ones doing all the damage because people are scared of them, have to make sure we obey by the regulations and their rules and so forth.
And so everybody's doing everything they do for defensive reasons.
There's no offense left in this country.
Everything's defense or defense.
Now, there are bright spots.
There are bright spots.
Let's go to the audio tape.
Soundbite number 21.
Wednesday morning on the Fox News channel, Fox and Friends, they interviewed the victorious senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss.
Brian Kilmead said, you fought off Bill Clinton, you fought off Al Gore.
You fought off Ludacris, the rapper in that order.
They came down to fight for Jim Martin.
In the end, if success leaves clues, Senator Saxby Chambliss, what can the party learn from your win?
Well, I think we've obviously got to take away from this that there are lessons out there that we needed to have learned in 2006.
Maybe we didn't, but in 2008, we've got to look back and make sure that we build up towards 2010 on a foundation that Ronald Reagan told us about years ago.
And that is Republicans stand for smaller government, fiscal responsibility, more individual rights and freedoms, and lower taxes.
And we've got to get back to those fundamentals.
That's what we talked about on the campaign trail.
And obviously, it resonated with our constituents.
Hallelujah.
The only damn problem, and I'm sorry for yelling here.
The only damn problem is that the people in his own party think he's nuts.
People in his own party think Ronald Reagan, well, the year of Reagan is over.
We're going to go back to get Reagan.
You know what they're going to say about Saxby Chambliss?
The Republican Party.
Tell you what they're going to say in Washington, in the elite corridors of the Republican Party.
Well, of course, it's Georgia.
Of course, it's the South.
It's the South.
And that's where the pro-laugh are, and that's where the NRA ground is.
And that's who embarrasses us in the Republican Party.
Of course, it's patently obvious.
Was there anything like even Saxby Chambliss's first campaign that finished in the need for a runoff?
Did he run on Reagan in his original campaign?
I'm not sure, but I don't think it was as foremost and pronounced as it was in a runoff.
I'll tell you something else that was missing.
And we cannot, we cannot eliminate this.
There was no Obama.
There were just Obama surrogates.
And as there was no Obama, what else was there not?
There was no image.
There was no PR.
There was no charisma.
And there certainly weren't any ideas because Obama ran on no ideas.
He's still not putting forth ideas.
Obama is still in the process of being, not doing.
He's hiring all these other people to do.
When Obama's not on the scene, this proof, this election was so winnable, is what I'm getting at.
Was so winnable.
If again, we just had not been afraid of the historic aspect, if we had not been afraid of the charisma, if we had not been afraid, if we had not treated the nation like a bunch of winders and said, yeah, we believe we should give to you two.
We'll just do it in a different way.
Yes, and it will be bipartisan about it.
I'm going to work with you, Democrats.
I don't think Saxby Chambliss said one damn word about working with Democrats in a runoff, did he?
I'll bet you he didn't.
And I know as sure as hell is I'm sitting here, Sarah Palin, when she went in there, did not talk about working with Democrats.
The Saxby Chandler campaign, and you can read it and weep, Republican Party, is your ticket.
And it was your touch.
What's so maddening about this?
In fact, the Republican Party in certain areas is still trying to destroy Sarah Palin.
Barbara Walters in the interview, I don't know if it's going to make the cut tonight, but in the interview, she tried to upbraid me for liking Sarah Palin.
She really yelled at me.
And I yelled back, what don't you like about her?
She was uninformed.
I said in one interview, one interview, the Katie Couric, and you're willing to throw her overboard.
I told her how much I admired her, loved her, and so forth.
And Saxby Chandler basically said the same thing.
You know, Brian, I cannot see it diminishing.
I mean, I can't overstate the impact she had down here.
All these folks did a great job coming in.
They all allowed us to add momentum to where we were in the campaign.
But when she walks in a room, folks just explode.
And they really did pack the house everywhere we went.
She's a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she's got a great future in the Republican Party.
That's Saxby Chambliss talking about Sarah Palin, who put him over the top.
And he also, he had everybody down there.
He had Romney down there, Rudy down there, Sarah Palin.
And our party is too clunk-headed to still.
I still don't think they get it.
Now, see, this is my point.
This is my point.
Senator Shelby, by the way, he's on TV, CNBC, running very, very, very hard.
He doesn't want GM to get the bailout or Ford or Chrysler.
I don't want to get the bailout.
We'll throw aside for the moment that the auto industry in his state's thriving, Alabama, other than the 3GM plants, which are going to close, even if they get the bailout.
And Senator Shelby said, I looked at their plan, and I don't see anything in there about making a profit.
I just see much facts.
And this is my point.
Find for me one member of Congress who could read a business plan and say, okay, that's where you're going to make profit.
What do they know about it?
The biggest deficit spenders in the history of this country are elected officials.
The most irresponsible people with money in our country are elected officials.
And they dare and sit there and demand thrift.
Can you imagine if we got to have hearings with these guys?
Okay, I want you to account.
You say the taxpayers are going to profit from the bailout of AIG.
I want to see it on paper.
I want to see how this is going to happen.
Mr. Citizen could say to Mr. Congressman, folks, this ought to have you fuming what is happening out there.
Rosie in Cincinnati, nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, glad you're back.
Thank you.
Hey, just I was commenting on Whoopi Goldberg's criticism of you for saying not very nice things about Hillary Clinton.
And if memory serves me correctly, is this not the woman who at a family-friendly Carrie Edwards rally in 04 grabbed a crotch and said, keep your hands off my you-know-what?
Yeah, said Bush.
Yes.
Yes, but there's a different standard for liberal entertainers and comedians.
And, of course, I didn't sing about Hillary.
We played the full statement.
I was engaged in a discussion of the harshness of our culture toward aging and women and so forth.
But look, you know, Rosie, I appreciate your support.
You have to understand, these people all want to be me.
Well, I think Whoopi listens to your show, if she does, because I think hers has failed miserably, has it not?
She did do a radio show in the morning in New York.
I don't think she's doing it anymore.
That's why she's at The View.
But this is what I mean.
It's easier to list Hollywood and TV people who don't have a radio show now take less time to do that than to list those who do.
They all want to get into radio.
And I'll guarantee you, it's not because of the Disney network.
Thanks, Chris.
Glad you're back.
You bet.
You're Belinda, California.
Elliot, I have one minute, but I wanted to squeeze you in here.
Rush, here it comes quickly.
I'm glad you mentioned it before.
The thing that's making my head explode is all this junk about corporate greed.
Now, you mentioned it before, and here, the worst people to spend money, to give money to, are the unions and our government.
And what I want to see is Chris Dodd and Bonnie Frank sitting where the GM and Ford execs are, and you sitting up there on the bench asking them questions about why they've bankrupted the company, not the other way around.
And the mortgage industry, and how did they profit personally from it?
There you go.
This corporate-grade business is this typical central planning lingo, folks, designed to get people hating these guys who run corporations, any corporations, large or small.
And again, the most irresponsible, the most untalented, the most wasteful people with a pile of money in this country are elected officials in any branch of government, in any federal government or state government.
One final thought to chew on during all of this auto-bailout talk.
Understand one thing.
The UAW has offered not one serious concession.
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