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Dec. 26, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:43
December 26, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
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I really am.
I'm so sad today.
Which is odd because we're in the middle of a sitcom here, folks.
Every story, every sound bite, is just hilarious.
And the reason I'm sad is that I can't laugh at it because if I start laughing, I get into a coughing spasm, and I don't want to do that.
So I'm sad because I'm happy.
I want to laugh, but I can't.
What a horrible position to be.
Live from the Southern Command in Sony, South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
And that means when we go to the phones, the content of the program is all yours.
Monday through Thursday, this program is about what I care about exclusively.
But on Friday we open it up.
Whatever you basically want to say is fair game.
Here's the telephone number, 800-282-2882, the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
What was the exact number of jobs that were cut?
253,000.
Where did I see this number 500 some odd thousand?
Where did where did I see?
Because I'm getting confused here.
It was a yesterday.
Here it is.
Okay.
Employers cut the axed 530.
Okay.
So what were you doing telling me 200 some odds, Nerdly?
See, this you were you were complaining about Barbara Walter's researcher, and you just had me using an unemployment number and it was half.
Half right.
Here's the point.
I wanted to have the number 533,000 brands, is that what it is?
I'm I'm gonna wager that some of you who were laid off in November are listening to this program.
And so I want to say something to you.
I want you all to realize that the vast majority of you and that 533,000 have been laid off not because of current economic circumstances, but because of what the people you work for fear is going to happen starting next year.
In other words, you are the first Barack Obama layoffs, those that took place in November.
Remember the drive-by said the number was totally unexpected.
The experts were shocked at how high the number is.
The reason the experts were shocked at how high the number is is because the economic circumstances didn't indicate that many people be laid off or fired.
What's happening here, I hate to tell you this.
We warned you people.
What's happening here is that businesses large and small are making plans to downsize and get ready for what they fear is coming from an Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress starting next year.
This guy has talked about all kinds of massive new spending.
He has and I don't know where we're going to get the money for this.
And I made a speech last night to Hillsdale College, and by the way, the audio and the transcript of that speech, if you have signed up for the uh the special service that we offer at Rushlimbaugh.com is called uh Rush in a Hurry.
The audio of my speech last we went about 40 minutes, I think, will be sent out in the Rush in a Hurry email that we send out.
It goes out about uh anywhere from four to four thirty, sometimes five o'clock in the afternoon, uh, along with a transcript.
If you don't get the rush in a hurry email, then it'll be when we update the site around six Eastern to reflect the contents of today's program.
Anybody can get the Rush in a Hurry email, it's El Freebo.
You just have to go to Rushlimbaugh.com and sign up for it.
But one of the points I made in this in this speech last night is I talked to the Hillsdale College people, Dr. Larry Arne runs the place, a very conservative group, and I said we conservatives uh have a big battle ahead of us because there's some people in our movement who have lost their conservative way who think it is the new conservative way.
And they think we need to get into a competition with Democrats over compassionate use of government.
In other words, we got to become big spenders too.
We just have to do it nicer.
We have to do it smarter, whatever.
Which, of course, that's not conservatism, but the question is, where are we going to get this money that they want us to spend in the first place?
Where are we going to get it?
We don't have any four.
We're printing it in Milwaukee in two neighborhoods.
They're printing their own currency to use.
Nothing illegal about it, apparently.
They're printing up their own their own currency.
And I I they're just doing it because I don't know, maybe they're separatists, who the hell knows?
Doesn't matter, but it's it's a good point.
Where are we going to get this money?
Where's anybody going to get this money to spend?
We're already into the seven to eight trillion figure with all of this bailout stuff.
Where are we going to get it?
Well, businesses know that you just can't go print it.
You have to earn it, you have to save it, or you have to lay people off, cut expenses, or what have you.
And I'm telling you, those of you have been laid off in November.
Vast majority of you are laid off because the places you work are scared to death of what's coming next year, and they're paring down and they're getting ready for it.
They've heard that there are tax increases coming.
They have heard that uh if you make more than 250, your taxes are gonna go up, and they've heard Obama say, well, we may have to delay that for a while, but they don't, they can't trust it.
And so the unexpected rise in the unemployment numbers, I'm convinced is a is a is a direct reflection on the uh coming Obama administration and what people who have to deal responsibly with their money, unlike Congress, uh, businesses and so forth, what they are doing to prepare for that uh for that onslaught.
Everything is a sitcom today.
From Montgomery, Alabama.
Belching and gaseous cows and pigs could start costing them money if a federal proposal to charge taxes for air polluting animals becomes law.
You heard right.
Democrats are proposing a fee.
They call it a fee.
It's a tax on smelly cows and hogs.
So far are turning their noses up at the notion, which is one of several put forward by the EPA after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases emitted by belching and flatulence amounts to air pollution.
The Supreme Court gave the EPA the sole authority to determine this.
This is one of the most ridiculous things the federal government's tried to do is at Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks.
It would require farms or ranches with more than 25 dairy cows, with more than 50 beef cattle, or more than 200 pigs to pay an annual fee of about 175 dollars for every cow, eighty-seven dollars fifty cents per head of beef cattle, and twenty dollars for every hog.
And all that all that had to happen was for the United States Supreme Court to bastardize the U.S. Constitution to give an agency, the EPA the right to determine what's air pollution.
Here we have creatures created by God who are now just the normal it is just it's as absurd, it's laughable.
It is so absurd.
So now, given what Harry Reid said about being able to smell the tourists in summertime, maybe they're gonna think that they can get away with taxing tourists who visit the Capitol for being smelly.
Because Harry Reid identified them.
He made a point to let us know that we stink.
Taxpayers who visit the Capitol stink, said Harry Reed.
So could it be that the taxpayers stink tax is not far down the pike?
This is not even the Obama administration, but it is the kind of thinking that will populate the Obama administration.
You think this is absurd.
Wait till they get going on some of this other global warming stuff they have planned for you, ladies and gentlemen.
You start getting into cap and trade and some of these other ideas, it's gonna it's gonna take every bit of energy we have to be able to sit around here and laugh.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with him.
Hi, welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have here on open line Friday on the excellence in broadcasting network.
I'll tell you something else that's going on with these unemployment numbers, folks, and I want to throw this out to you too.
And I, you know, you you think that uh the election of Obama, everybody's all hunky-dory and happy, and all these uh these cabinet appointments that he's making.
Oh, look at these centrists, look at these uh look at these moderate faces why we were expecting all these wacko radical leftists, and they got all the Clinton people in there, oh, we can rest easy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Um, the people who have to take their lives seriously, uh, and there are a lot of people in the country that do.
Sadly, there are way too many in this country who don't have to take their lives seriously because others are looking out for them.
But if you own or run a business, and you hire people, and you have responsibilities to pay them, and you have regulations requiring you to provide them this benefit or that, and you've got to take your life very seriously.
And you have to listen very carefully to what people who say they want to lead your country tell you.
You have to listen and you have to pay them very close attention.
And I will guarantee you that Barack Obama and his desire to have unions be able to go into any business in the world and organize by eliminating a secret ballot is enough to scare a whole lot of people into firing a lot of employees or laying them off before Obama has a chance to come in there and unionize their shop.
So it's not, I think his unemployment numbers to 533,000.
I nobody will be able to convince me that a good percentage of that number has everything to do with fear of what's headed down the pike from an Obama administration starting next January.
And now back to the phones, as people patiently have been waiting here on Open Line Friday.
This is Stephen Bakersfield, California.
Hello.
Good morning, Rush.
Pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you, John.
I've been a listener for about 20 years, and I've always admired your common sense and sense of humor.
Thank you, sir.
Yeah.
Um my question, really, and if anybody would know it's probably you, why haven't any of these people in Congress been asked to recuse themselves from voting on giving away our money to the very same companies and corporations and individuals, UAW, Freddie and Fanny, uh preferential loans to die.
You know, it looks to me like bribery.
And what's to prevent these guys from taking the money Congress gives them our money and shoving it back to the Congress people for another bailout down the road.
It's insane.
It's got to stop.
I'm I'm telling you, you have you have hit the bullseye here on something that is, I think very, very important in our country right now.
Thank you.
What you are basically talking about is where the hell has ethics gone.
That's what you're asking.
Yes, sir.
And you know, ethics in Washington is uh like everything else, it's a it's a partisan two-way street.
Democrats Really are not subject to any ethics.
Victor Davis Hanson has a three-pager today at National Review Online about this very interesting conundrum that exists there.
And he I'll just give you one example off the uh off top.
Here you have Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Let's just take Chris Dodd.
Chris Dodd actually accepted money from countrywide.
The big mortgage broker.
And bank.
He got a preferred mortgage interest rate.
He was in the VIP program.
That was the purpose of it.
He oversaw legislation as the chairman of the banking committee that governed the mortgage industry, including his good buddy Angelo, over it countrywide.
Not only is Chris Dodd not shamed, not only did he not resign, not only did he get him not to get embarrassed, he's now in charge of rewriting the rules again for the mortgage industry.
In the meantime, Trent Lott happened to make a joke about how much better America would be if Strom Thurmond had become governor somewhere, and he's forced out of the Senate for some words he told at a birthday party for an old man who couldn't even hear him anymore.
So Republicans fall on the sword all the time, and then the Republicans demand that their own guys fall on the sword.
The Republicans were the ones that forced Trent Lott out.
I mean the Democrats right in there demanding it, but the White House said, yep, we think you ought to go.
You're embarrassed.
Ted Stevens.
Ted, get the hell out of there.
Just one re-election, but you're you're you're an unethical guy.
Democrats never fall on the sword.
Nobody ever demands they fall on the sword.
So the answer to your question is at our juncture in history right now, Democrats are not capable.
It's not possible by virtue of the definition of the word for them to be unethical.
So there's no need for them to recuse themselves.
Is there any possible way to put a provision in any of these things to keep this money from being shoveled back to the same criminals that are taking our money now?
Uh well, the people that would have to write the provision, uh the people you're referring to here as the criminals, and I doubt that they're gonna ace themselves out of this.
Probably not.
I mean, what the I I'll tell you, I so I was talking about this on the radio yesterday, and I'm I mentioned it a little bit in the uh speech last night in Washington.
This it's it's it's mind-boggling to watch this.
It defies all common sense.
All people can do is sit around and laugh.
We're all Will Rogers now.
You know, we're all Will Rogers making jokes about Congress.
It's gotten to the point now that it is just it's absurd.
It's gone beyond obscene.
Nobody takes these people seriously.
The American people are fit to be tied over it, but have no power to do anything about it.
What can the American people do?
They just elected, they just elected these people to run the show.
At the same time, they're they're they're fit to be tied over it.
I don't care.
You that does not seem to be any possible way a Democrat can ever violate ethics.
They just simply don't apply.
Here is Mike in Greenville, North Carolina.
You're on open line Friday.
Hello, sir.
Hey Roger, how are you doing?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
Hey, I just wanted to point out that all we have to do is look back to 2002 with the U.S. steel industry for exactly how this is should play out.
Uh back in the 02, the steel industry was at an all-time low.
Uh the we're making steel for undermanufacturing costs, and in that year, Batman Steel LTV all, you know, went into chapter seven, the government let them because it was an overcapacity.
And new core, which is the mini mill took over.
U.S. steel is still running strong.
And right now, you know, uh, you know, six years later, the U.S. steel market is phenomenal.
It's the the uh industry is balanced as far as uh capacity-wise, and they're making a lot of money.
So, you know, we just have to look six years in in the past to know exactly what we need to do.
We don't even need to look, I mean, that's a great example.
Uh, and of course, the Steelers of the football team of U.S. Steel, I mean, they've never gone into recession, they're still kicking what out there.
Absolutely.
I hear you want to pick.
Absolutely.
So so the but you don't have to go to the past uh in order to find uh uh uh evidence of how to do something.
Look to the present.
All you have to do is go to Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia.
And uh maybe Virginia, I'm not sure.
One of the two Carolinas, you're gonna find a thriving automobile industry in those states.
And while they are foreign quote-unquote cars, they're made in America.
And they cost basically $2,000 a car less than cars made in Michigan because these arriving automobile companies in the South are not unionized.
OJ Simpson, 15 years in jail.
There I've said it and covered the story.
Moving on.
Everything's a sitcom today.
We're in a sitcom.
God is writing a sitcom for us.
It's a press release from UCLA.
UCLA expert blames American values for health care crisis.
To heal our ailing health care system, we need to stop thinking like Americans.
That's the message of two articles by UCLA's Dr. Mark Newar, a leading expert on national health care reform, published this week in Neurology, the Journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Americans prize individual choice and resist limiting care, says Newar, a professional of clinical neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
We believe that if doctors can treat very ill patients aggressively and keep every moment of people in the last stages of life under medical care, then they should.
We choose to hold these values.
Consequently, we choose to have a more expensive system than Europe or Canada.
Consider these statistics.
and The United States boasts the world most expensive health care system, yet only one-sixth of Americans are insured.
Medical expenditures exceed two trillion dollars annually, making health care the economy's largest sector four times bigger than defense.
We might find that part of the reason is the government meddling in this business.
We might also find the introduction of trial lawyers into this business might be contributing to all of this money being spent.
Another statistic, by 2015, the U.S. government is projected to spend four trillion, four trillion dollars on health care, or 20% of the nation's gross domestic product.
An aging population will boost spending.
Half of Medicare costs support very sick people in their last stages of life, and experts estimate that Medicare funds will be exhausted by 2018.
31% of U.S. health care funds go toward administration.
We push a lot of paper, Newar says.
We spend twice as much as Canada.
And Canada has a more streamlined healthcare system that demands doctors complete less paperwork.
Yeah, more people die up there.
More people leave their system to come down here anyway.
10% of U.S. expenses are spent on defensive medicine, pricey tests ordered by doctors, afraid of missing anything, however unlikely.
Doctors don't want to be accused in court of a delayed diagnosis, so they bend over backwards to find something even if it's rare in order to cover themselves.
Reforming the U.S. health care system with the goal of providing universal, affordable high-quality care will require rethinking our overall values and paying greater attention to care-related expenditures.
Snerdley, why are you so shocked?
Why No, this guy is doing us a favor.
This guy is more right than he knows.
In order to get national health care, we do have to stop thinking like Americans.
Real Americans wouldn't put up with it.
We need to start thinking like socialists.
If we're gonna that's the only way it's gonna happen.
This is this guy, I know it offends you because he's advocating it.
He's ad he's advocating, he's advocating that we change the way our values are structured so as to get national health care.
This is exactly what people need to be told.
This is un-American to do it the way it's being proposed, universal national health care.
Speaking of which, why the hell did Hillary Clinton take the Secretary of State job?
I thought that the two most formative, pressing, important issues in her life.
Remember, she had been working for 35 years on health care and children.
And all of a sudden, pst you, health care, you kids, I'm off to foggy bottom.
I'm gonna run around with Madeline Albright, and I'm gonna run around with Sidney Blumenthal, and I'm gonna bring in all of my behind the scenes manipulators that I had in a West Wing working for me over at the State Department.
In fact, AP has a story about this.
No, Snurdly, this guy's doing us a favor, even though he doesn't know it.
Universal health care is not American.
In order for us to have universal health care, we're gonna stop being Americans.
Now you may be tired of being attacked as an American, and I'm tired of being attacked as an American too, particularly by other people who think they're Americans.
But the left put a bag of manure in front of them and they'll step in it.
Guarantee you.
Doesn't matter which leftist you do it to, they will find the manure.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell a difference between the manure and the bag when you are discussing a leftist.
Preparing for her new role as Sex Secretary of State.
Remember now, God has put us in a sitcom here, folks, and is writing the script.
Preparing for her new role as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton is moving to surround herself with a cast of die-hard loyalists and veterans of her husband's administration to help her cope with world crises, and pardon the sniffles, backstage Washington power plays.
For her team of foreign policy experts, Mrs. Clinton is expected to draw heavily from the staff of Madeline Albright, who was an early supporter of Clinton's unsuccessful bid for the White House to deal with internal Obama administration affairs, State Department bureaucratic politics and media pressures.
Hillary Clinton appears set to tap current Senate aides and former White House Hillary Land Stalwarts, whose reputations for insularity and staunch protectiveness has already set off anxiety among career foreign service officers.
For Clinton's personal staff names already floated, included, longtime Confidon and 2008 Clinton presidential campaign manager Maggie Williams, attorney Cheryl Mills, personal assistant Huma Abidin,
a current senior advisor and spokesman Philippe Reigns, and Clinton's chief of staff when she was First Lady Melanie Ververe, all are known to be fiercely loyal.
The prospect of their imminent arrival at the State Department has been a hot topic of nervous corridor conversation among many in the diplomatic corps who fear they will be frozen out of positions of influence.
They are right.
Hillary is gonna put her nurse ratchet staff over there, and then one name not mentioned it's gonna be there is Sidney Blumenthal and he is I mean he's Fredo He's Michael He's Sonny before he gets assassinated by the rival mob.
This guy, folks, is I mean he is he is Sean Avery.
This guy is gonna be the State Department is never gonna be the same.
They're not gonna know what hit him, ladies and gentlemen, and of course Bill Clinton understands exactly how it's gonna be.
That was uh old buddy Paul Shanklin, the vocal trail as Bill Clinton, uh take off on Billy Joel's song, of course, she's always a woman.
She's always uh bitching to me.
Lillian in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Great to have you on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Well, hello, Rush.
Uh thanks for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am.
And um you also want to thank you for homeschooling me for twenty years.
You're more than welcome, I appreciate that.
But I have a story to tell about Oregon Coast.
My daughter was up there, she was recovering from an automobile accident, laying in the sun on the beach in Oregon, next to one of those huge rocks that they have.
And along came one of those sleeper waves, washed her right out to sea, and all she remembered was going around in a circle and uh like a washing machine, she said, and then she doesn't remember anything else.
And she was thrown up on the beach one mile away.
And someone she did the right thing because she we what what happened was she got involved in a rip current.
Yes, and the worst thing you can do is fight it.
You just go with it and let it take you, just just keep your head above water.
She didn't have any choice though.
She was out.
She was unconscious.
But that's what happened.
You know, that's now that's that's that's a miracle.
It is a miracle.
To survive unconscious um in a r uh in a r in a uh you know a roiling uh rip current ocean for a mile.
A mile, and they threw her up on the beach, and somebody walking by it happened to be a nurse with her boyfriend.
They went down to see why she was laying there, and uh they said she's not breathing, so he she sent him for the ambulance, and uh they came, took her to the hospital dead on arrival.
And when they got her in there, they started using these panels or whatever they use, they slapped them back and forth, and then put these saline needles, hot saline needles into her abdomen, and they got her to breathe.
This is your daughter you were talking about.
This is my daughter, and you were talking about an hour here.
And she was very thin.
She had been in an automobile accident, everything was wrong with her.
And they think her organs froze right away because there was no fat to protect her and anything, you know.
And they took her to the trauma center and they saved her life, but she should have been dead.
Wow.
Uh an unbelievable story.
And I never heard it related, and when I heard what I you you told us and what I read in the paper today, I said, Maddie's my daughter's story.
Incidentally, her name is Maddie, and she called you once.
Really?
How how old is she when this happened?
Maddie has three children, and uh she couldn't go on the class trip that day because of her back.
She was so she had so much back problems, yeah, and they wouldn't let her go.
Well, how old was she when this happened?
When this happened, well, she's what?
She's forty-eight now, and that was about eight or nine years ago.
So that would make her thirty-nine or forty.
Yeah, right.
If you talk to her, I'm sure she's still thirty-nine.
Well, she's holding herself together and she's trying to mainstream herself, but she's been through a lot of it.
Oh, I bet that's been a real battle.
Well, that that is an amazing story.
And it happened out there at Proposal Rock.
Well, not uh not at that same beach, but you know, it's the coastline's the same all the way up there, and it has long flats where you walk out a long ways before you get to the water.
And she was just laying in the sun.
She does she loves to do that when she comes to Cape Cod, that's what she does.
And umbone to her, this there had been an earthquake in Japan the day before.
And I think it caused one of those unforeseen tsunamis.
Right, right.
And that took her out, and uh I got a call that my daughter drowned.
That was my call.
Uh that is just mind boggled.
Well, if you're just joining us, folks, thanks, Lillian, very much for that.
If if you're just joining us, Lillian called to tell us this story because there's a tragic thing that happened uh at place in the on the coast in Oregon at uh proposal rock.
People go there to propose to each other, and this guy was taking his woman he had just met out there to propose to her, and out of nowhere, a big three-foot wave comes up and sweeps her out, seeing she's gone before this guy even got the ring out.
And he looked up, he was going to take off his coat, go out there and get her.
Before he could look up again, she was gone.
When he first looked up and noticed her gone, she was 30 feet out there.
It's hard to visualize this.
Uh, but it it obviously it it it happened.
It's just hard to visualize.
What are the odds that we're gonna have somebody who survive one of these?
Call us and tell us about it.
On what other show would this happen?
Here's Scott in Spanish Fork, Utah.
Great to have you on Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Thanks, Rush.
Hey, could you please explain cap and trade in a layman's terms?
Yeah.
F R A U D. It's all you need to know.
Here's how it here's here's theoretically, here's how it works.
You have two evil polluting businesses.
One of them is an automobile plant, and the other one is an oil refinery.
Two of the most hated industries of the drive-bys and the liberals.
The government will then arbitrarily, according to some science that they will assign somebody to figure out, they will allow a certain amount of pollution from each factory.
Then, what if if one of the factories produces more than it is allowed, another factory somewhere in the country will be able to well, that the overpolluting factory will be able to buy credits from another factory not polluting its share so that it will be allowed to overpollute as long as somebody down the road is under polluting.
Oh boy.
And so the cap the cap and trade basically is just a work it the system's already in place called pollution credits, is what it used to be called.
Now they're calling it cap and trade, and it's also involves if you overpollute, go and plant some trees, you know, stupid things like this.
It is in place in Europe.
It is a scam.
It is not working, it's not producing any money except for the people who came up with the idea, the Algors of the world.
It will mean absolutely nothing, but it will destroy the coal industry, and Obama has promised us this.
We are living a sitcom.
God is writing it.
The Hillary Clinton syndrome has hit Kansas City.
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