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Jan. 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:19
January 8, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
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The views expressed by the host on this program.
Well, barely anybody else out there expressing these views right now, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm sometimes feel like the last man standing here.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program, and this is the EIB Network, and we are happy to have you with us.
Great that you are out there.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800 282-2882.
Email address Lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
Mr. Snerdley has advised me, and I think Mr. Snurdley may have a point here.
Mr. Snerdley advised me during the top of the hour break here that uh what was the fact that a point of view, the analysis of this coming socialism, massive government expansion, uh, is only occurring here for other places too, but I mean this is the biggest.
The drive-by media is just in total swoon mode here.
They're not analyzing this at all in terms of whether it'll work or not, and in in real terms, they're examining it, you know, is this going to benefit Obama politically and so forth and so on.
And there are therefore going to be literally hundreds of thousands of new people tuning to this program, because this program will be the only place you can go to hear something other than what you hear everywhere else in the news, be it a magazine, be it a newspaper, be it a TV news broadcast or cable network.
And as such, back in the early days of this program, we advised people who were new listeners, that this program is actually deep.
This is a program of considerable weight and considerable depth when it comes to the explanation, the analysis of conservative principles and values as compared to the uh this the the forward marching liberalism that uh seems to have nothing in its way here.
As such, it really is not possible, except for a select few, to listen to this program for a day and to understand it.
This program requires a minimum of six weeks of steady listening in order to be able to place in context everything you hear here.
For example, I'll use the Barack the Magic Negro song.
Let's just say as an example that today is your first day listening to the program, and all you know about Barack the Magic Negro is what you have read, which is a hundred and eighty degrees wrong in all other media.
You hear the song, you have no idea what went into the making, the writing, the producing of the song, and you hear it like God, this is outrageous.
He calling our president Negro, which of course is not what it's about.
Had you, however, been listening for six weeks prior to the introduction of the song, you would understand it totally.
You would accept and appreciate its brilliance.
So and and virtually we've spent an hour today analyzing Obama's speech, his economic speech today.
If you tuned in for the first time today and heard that, and particularly if you are not a conservative, if you're liberal or you don't know what you are, or you think you're a moderate, and you heard my first hour today, you would think it was nothing but unfair criticism of our new president, and how dare Mr. Limbaugh do that?
Doesn't he want him to succeed?
Everybody else wants poor Obama to succeed.
It's tough out there.
He's inheriting a lot of problems.
And of course, what you would have heard me say is he's causing them.
He's gonna make it worse, and that he wants to make it worse.
And you're not going to understand.
Why would somebody say the president of the United States wants to make the economy worse?
And if this is your first day listening, you have no hope of understanding something you hear that might appear outrageous, but to all of those 20 plus million who listen regularly.
It's a breath of fresh air, it is welcome, and they totally understand it.
So I beg, I plead, I instruct, I command, I suggest, don't doubt me.
If you are new to the Rush Limbaugh program, you will only be shortchanging yourself, making a fool of yourself, and really blowing an opportunity if you give this show only one day.
Or only one segment.
Or only now, I said the select few who can get it before six weeks.
There are a select few, and it has nothing to do with intelligence.
It has to do with the degree to which they are oriented as conservatives.
It has to do with the sophisticated sense of humor that they understand.
If you are an uptight hand wringer, constantly waiting to be offended, well, you will think this is the place for you.
But those of you who are new, the 20 plus million who listen to this program never find it even controversial.
Because they don't disagree with any of it.
And they don't find it offensive.
And they don't find it mean-spirited.
They find it wonderful.
They find it comforting.
They find it validating that somewhere in the national media, somebody still agrees with what they think.
So I suggest to you, as a favor to you, and as you can do a favor for yourself.
Once you're here, don't make the mistake of misjudging and misunderstanding what happens here.
And then fleeing.
Because if you do, you are going to be missing one of the most beneficial, informative, educational, entertaining three hours of your life each and every day.
Talk to anybody who has been with us for more than a year.
Talk to the 20 million who've been with us since the get-go.
Ask them, and don't you just listen to what they say.
They're more informed than you are just tuning in.
We love having you here.
And we love America.
We love the America of our founding.
We love the America of a constitution.
We love the United States of America and the principles of our founding, which defined and made this the greatest nation in the history of human civilization.
And we all believe that a great country requires great people.
People who are happy, content, inspired, motivated, prosperous, or seeking all those things.
The pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of excellence.
This program is an inspiration for those people.
This program motivates those people.
This program tells those people it's still possible when they may not think it is because they watch the rest of the drive-by media as well.
This program is such a golden opportunity for all Americans.
But if you are going to take the plunge and listen to this program because you've read some controversial reference to it.
And if you're going to listen for 10 minutes or 30 or an hour or even a whole show, you will not, after that period of time, have the slightest idea what really happens on this program because so this is an ongoing.
This program never ends, folks.
We just have 21 hour commercial and sleep breaks.
But the program never ends.
It's a continuum.
And in my analysis of the Obama speech last hour, I referenced things that happened six years ago.
I referenced things that happened last June that you may not even know or remember happened.
I, of course, do remember and have instant recall on these things.
And that is another illustration of being able to understand this program in context.
At the same time, understand that there are those out there in other aspects of media and in politics who want you to misunderstand what happens here.
But you owe it to yourself to spend at least six weeks solid.
And I promise, I guarantee, if you do that, you will never leave.
You will never go anywhere else.
Oh, you might go somewhere else, but You'll be saddened by the experience.
At the same time, you'll be enlightened at how stupid everybody else is compared to you.
And you will want to inform them and educate them.
And you will suggest that they listen to this program.
And they will call you names.
Because if they haven't, they will only know what this program is on the basis of the criticism of those who are envious and jealous of this program and its success.
Now, before we go to the timeout here, the we call them obscene profit breaks, because we are proud of profit here at the EIB network.
We have yet to have in 20 years a down year.
Every year we have grown financially while expanding.
In all the 20 years, we have only lost two employees.
One to marriage and the other one to California.
We do consider that a loss.
Now, Barack Obama, ladies and gentlemen, has launched a war to save the U.S. economy.
That's what he wants us to believe with his speech today, which was just a rehash of his campaign rhetoric, which was empty platitudes.
Remember with Obama, it doesn't matter what he says, how he says it.
Now, how is Obama going to launch this war to save the U.S. economy?
He's going to do this by occupying the private sector with government forces.
This is how you must look at this.
He pretty much made it out to be a war.
We don't have much time.
We got to solve this.
We don't have we can't wait.
We've got to get this done.
So he's going to occupy the private sector with government forces, but he says he only wants to do that short term.
But the question is, can we believe him?
We don't, so we need benchmarks in this war.
We need timelines.
We need to know three months from now, six months from now, how the war is going.
We need an exit strategy.
We need to know when government forces are going to remove themselves from the private sector.
In other words, we want our green zone back.
We want to know where the Abu Ghrabs are in advance.
We want to know where the prisoners are going to be put.
We want to know what it's going to take to get them out of prison.
We need a government exit strategy.
Will government really stand down as the U.S. economy stands up?
Well, the left is saying, are we really going to get out of Iraq when the Iraqi government is able to police themselves?
If after such time, and believe me, this war will fail.
There is no exit strategy because this plan of Obama's cannot possibly rescue.
Because the only stimulus in this economy is the average American who makes the country work.
And more of those people are losing their jobs.
And until they get their jobs back, until the economy is producing them, we're not going to have any kind of economic growth.
We're not going to escape the recession.
And the longer this goes on, the greater there will be a need for an insurgency inside the private sector, which will have been invaded by government forces, and
I. after this.
Federal prosecutors, ladies and gentlemen, have just announced that they found 173 million dollars in signed checks in the desk of Bernard Madoff.
So there was some money.
This is the money that he wanted to pay friends and family before he told his sons that there was nothing there.
There was 173 million somewhere to cover those checks.
That's what they found in his desk.
Greetings, welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, look at this here, folks.
You know that next month, years and years and years ago, the federal government, which is going to save the economy, the federal government's going to bail us out of this recession, demanded a total switch to digital television signals from analog effective next month.
Now they realize that there are a lot of Americans who don't have the slightest idea what digital or analog is.
They don't know what their TV is, whether it's digital or analog.
They were smart enough to know that on the drop dead date, those who had not switched would turn on their TVs one day and it wouldn't work.
And they wouldn't understand why.
So they came up with uh again financial incentives, vouchers, if you will, to give people who owned old-fashioned analog TVs money to go get a converter box, which they would not know how to connect to their analog TV to connect or to convert their analog TV to digital.
Well, it seems that not even greasing the skids has caused enough people to go out and purchase either a digital TV or a converter for their analog TV to become digital.
Because again, most people don't have the slightest clue.
Well, enough, not most, but uh enough here, don't have the slightest clue.
And so now the consumers union is urging Congress to delay the nation's transition to digital television, saying the program to help TV viewers prepare for the switch next month has been underfunded and poorly implemented.
Another government mess.
In a letter sent last night to President Bush, President Obama, Henry Waxman, and Jay Rockefeller, Consumers Union, said Congress should push back the transition until a plan is in place to minimize the number of consumers who will lose TV signals.
They say it like it is a bad thing.
I frankly, ladies and gentlemen, think it might be a good thing.
Because only the dumbest and most susceptible of our people are still using analog.
And if they all of a sudden wake up one day and can't watch Oprah and can't watch MTV, and can't watch HG.
Have you ever watched that HGTV network?
That cable and HGT, the home.
Somebody sent me a note the other day.
I had never watched them.
Somebody said that network alone is responsible for the housing bubble and housing crisis.
That network convinced everybody their house price was never going to decline.
Get to everybody go get a house, showed video of all these super duper cribs and how they were decorated and had people going out there doing that.
I've never seen the network, so I don't know, but two or three people sent me this note criticizing H TV the network.
Now, obviously, the plan to switch them analog to digital has not uh has not worked.
And the reason I think Congress will probably go along with this, is their voters that I'm talking about here, haven't the slightest clue what analog versus digital is, and when their TVs went dark, wouldn't know what to do except call their congressmen.
And I'm sure that Bob Wexler, Congressman from Florida who lives in Maryland, doesn't want to get a bunch of phone calls from his constituents, nor does any other member of Congress saying, my telephone dead.
I get back.
Oh, what happened to TV?
And all these scatterwalls calling and complaining, uh, and plus the Democrats need these people watching their propaganda channels.
CNN, MSNBC, uh, and all of the uh all the guests that they have on there.
Uh I, too, ladies and gentlemen, have a personal stake in this.
You would think that I, El Rushbow, am 100% digital in all of my TVs.
Not true.
In two of me, I have two cars, each with two televisions.
These are analog televisions.
I have talked to the manufacturer overseas.
What are you going to do about putting digital TVs in the cars of mine?
And I, to date, have heard nothing from a company in question.
And so it's quite possible that if the government doesn't delay this, I might be dark in my back seat.
No, you can't get a no, you can't.
No, no, no.
Converter box will not work.
I'm not, I wouldn't go the converter box.
Don't insult me with this converter box business.
I wouldn't put a converter box for anything anywhere in my house.
Get the real thing to hell with a converter box.
Anyway.
So I myself might be a beneficiary of the otherwise ignorance and stupidity of a lot of Democrat voters who have failed to heed the call from their leaders to go digital with their TV screens.
It's a major concern.
You go out, you buy a car, it's got two TVs in the back and they're and they're analog.
See how things work out, ladies and gentlemen, if you just consistently rely at times on stupid Democrats, now and then something will work out.
Okay, now look, here is a great example of what I was just talking about in the first segment of this story about this program needing to be listened to for at least six weeks, if not longer, to understand the context.
I want to take you back to late in the campaign, the presidential campaign.
Barack Obama had an economic speech, and in the economic speech, he announced a partial plan to create jobs in the small business sector.
And one of the uh plans, the uh details was a $3,000 tax credit for every new hire.
In other words, a small business, depending on and maybe businesses that even are a little bit larger than the way government defines small business, would be given a $3,000 tax credit for every new employee hired.
And I said, and this probably was in October, September, October, and I said, this has no chance.
In fact, this is such a bad idea that my guess is whoever came up with it wants it to fail.
And I remember we had a couple of phone calls, some people were just incredulous.
What do you mean?
Obama wants to give businesses $3,000 for hiring people.
What could possibly be wrong?
I happen to love those calls because why would a business accept a $3,000 tax credit when it might cost them $50,000 to hire the person?
Business people hire employees because they have work that needs to be done that can't be done by the current workforce.
Because they're expanding.
Or somebody leaves.
Work, jobs are not welfare programs.
Companies do not exist in cities to hire people so the city exists.
The purpose of companies is to build their product or provide their service and earn a profit doing it.
While supplying a product or service that is more than acceptable to the people who are buying it.
And my theory back then was $3,000 tax credit when it costs.
And then what do you mean it costs $50,000 in hires?
Okay, say somebody hires, and actually, if you make $50, it costs you about cost about $65 or $70 to hire you.
You know that.
Well, how can that be Russia's salary $50,000?
Yeah, but there's their health care package there, and there's your number of other things they have to pay that you never see.
So to pay you $50 might cost them $70, $65 or $70.
Why would somebody hire somebody for that if they're going to get a $3,000 tax credit?
If they don't have the work for somebody to do, then Why would somebody devise a plan like this if they wanted it to fail?
Well, if you are a big government liberal like Obama is, and if you want the country to continue to demonize business people, you come up with a plan that you know the drive-by media is not going to analyze as I just did, and you say small business and other businesses are going to be given a $3,000 tax credit for every new person they hire.
And then what happens when the businesses don't do it?
Guess who gets to portray them as greedy and selfish?
Obama and his team.
And then you end up hating business even more because they don't care about you.
And since you haven't been given a proper economics education, also by design in the American public school system run by Obama's teachers' unions.
You haven't slightest clue what's just happened.
Well, lo and behold, when Obama announced his $340 billion tax cut plan as part of his trillion dollar stimulus.
I looked at it and I said, There's no tax cut in here.
The only thing is this wealth transfers for people that aren't working or businesses that are losing money, which are by definition bad businesses.
I hate to be cruel.
But how many of you think Ford and GM and all will go bankrupt?
A lot of you do, because they're not run right, right?
That's what you think.
Well, let's say the mom and pump dry cleaners down there is also show at a loss.
But you want them bailed out because of mom and pop and you know them and you take your clothes there.
What's the difference?
A bad business of bad business.
It's like Frank DeFord, Sports Illustrated once uh once said in in rebuking the notion that Chicago's a good baseball town.
Good sports town.
He says, Chicago fans, they support losers.
What's good about that?
If they had a bunch of dry cleaners that lost money all the time and they kept going there, would they say Chicago's a great laundry town?
So guess what, ladies and gentlemen?
I have here, holding in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, frankly, I'm surprised to see it.
A story from Stephen Olmacher from AP.
President elect Obama's proposed tax cuts are running into opposition from senators in his own party, who say they won't do much to stimulate the economy or create jobs.
They were especially critical of a proposed $3,000 tax credit for companies that hire or retrain workers.
Democrat Senator Kent Conrad, North Dakota, described it as misdirected.
Mutiny.
Mutiny in the United States Senate.
Conrad doesn't understand the purpose of this $3,000 tax credit.
It's not to increase employment.
It's designed to make business an even more susceptible target to hatred.
But nevertheless, nevertheless, his own party.
Well, it's not going to stimulate the economy.
Because they know it's not going to result in anybody being hired.
Bottom line, back to the audio sound, but you're going to get your phone calls El Quico.
Sit tight here, folks.
Another thing, you people that are new today and will be new tomorrow and new for five weeks.
Sometimes we don't get the phone calls till the second hour on this program.
Sometimes it takes them in the first hour.
But this is a program known as not being caller dependent.
We got a full board up there, and those of you who are on hold, be patient.
You're coming soon.
One more Obama, this from last night on CNBC.
The correspondent John Harwood interviewing Obama, and he says, is the deficit going to get bigger?
Now, Harwood used to be the Wall Street Journal.
Of course it's going to get bigger.
Obama has said it's going to get bigger by a trillion dollars a year.
But here's here's what the BAMster said last night.
We are going to use this money to temporarily boost the economy to create or save three million jobs.
Stop the tape.
How do you calculate a saved job?
How do you do that?
How do you calculate a job saved?
Here's the rest of the bite.
Also to put some down payments on things that we should have been doing over the last several decades that can help create a more competitive U.S. economy.
Examples.
Making sure that we are doubling alternative energy.
Making sure that uh we are reducing the cost of health care.
Building up the city.
All right, that's enough.
That's enough.
That's enough.
That's what I wanted to get to.
Make sure that we're doubling alternative energy.
Meaning the spending on it.
There isn't an alternative energy.
There isn't anything anywhere that we can harness that comes close to oil.
There is no alternative energy.
It is a sinkhole down which to throw money, but it will expand the far left and give them more power.
And it will cause a reduction in liberty for the rest of us once we're forced to drive these little Flintstone mobiles around that they come up with.
But the real big one here is making sure that we reduce the cost of health care.
Ladies and gentlemen, the objective is just the opposite.
To spend more on health care by nationalizing.
And I have here...
Again from the Associated Press from uh yesterday afternoon after this program ended.
Now holding this story right here in my nicotine-stained fingers.
And the headline is House of Representatives to vote on Obama-favored health plan.
Now remember, he just said we're going to start reducing the cost of health care.
House Democrats plan to give President Obama an early victory on health care, specifically children's health care, next week.
Leaders say that they are scheduling a vote on renewing the ship program, S C H I Popto P. When you're in broadcasting and you say ship.
It's the state children's health insurance program.
The legislation will look similar to bills that the House and Senate twice approved in 2007, but President Bush vetoed because of the additional $35 billion in spending, as well as the method of payment, a new tobacco tax.
Which they're trying to ban the use of tobacco while taxing it, increasing its taxation to fund an increase.
Obama just said reducing the cost of health care.
In the state children's health insurance program, Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers discussed whether to uh include reauthorization of the ship program as part of an economic stimulus package or as a standalone bill.
The growth of the stimulus package in recent weeks led to the decision to move ahead with the latter option.
So they're not going to make it part of the stimulus plan.
They're just going to spend it.
It's on top of the stimulus.
Health care, he is going to reduce the cost.
The cost is skyrocketed just with this one program.
And by the way, do you know that children up to the age of 30 will be eligible for the state children's health insurance program?
It is quite possible, ladies and gentlemen, for this is for families making up to $78,000 a year.
So it's quite possible that a family of four, mom and dad and two kids in their twenties, earning $78,000 a year could have you, i.e.
the government, pay for their health insurance.
Under the state.
This is why Bush vetoed it.
Now later in the story, there's a quote from Henry Waxman.
He called passing the children's health bill a down payment on national health insurance.
And that's exactly right.
They tried, Hillary tried for universal health care, went down to tubes too big, too massive.
This is now the incremental approach.
For the children.
For the grubby for the children.
Little rug rats destroying this country, and they don't even know it.
Crumb crunch.
For the children.
See, by the way, if you're listening for the first time and you just heard me call them crumb crunchers, rug rats destroying the country, you do not have previous programs, context to understand.
I love kids, especially those that are not mine.
It's a down payment on national health care, folks.
A stealth approach to nationalization of health care.
For the children.
And of course, who can oppose The children, even those worthless schlubs that are 28 still living at home.
And by the way, according to the bill, they don't even have to be living at home, these 28-year-old kids or 30-year-old kids.
And the tax for this, the payment of 61 cent increase on a pack of cigarettes, which will kill the sale of cigarettes.
It gives people more and more reason to quit.
And so you can sit around and you'll say, Well, yeah, good.
Good.
Make the smokers pay for a hate smokers.
They pollute secondhand smoke, third hand smoke, they're killing my cat, they're killing my dog, they're killing.
What happens when the tax on tobacco gets so high that have a lot of people quit and they just don't buy the product?
Then they come for you.
And then people like me are going to be saying, Yeah, yeah, you make those people who thought they weren't going to have to pay pay.
Make them hurt.
Make them understand exactly how we all get shafted when liberals come up with miracle cures for health care, the economy, and recessions.
This bus is headed over to Cliff folks, and I'm not going to be on it when it goes over.
Okay, it's back to the phones.
We have taken one call so far today.
We're gonna go to Philadelphia.
And Gil, great to have you here.
Thanks very much for waiting.
I appreciate it.
Hey, honored to, Rush.
You know, if you were anyone else, I'd tell you that you have no idea how right you are.
But seeing how, as you are Rush Limbaugh, you do know how right you are.
Ah, thank you very much.
See, that's exactly what happens.
This member of the audience has been around a long time, knows things.
And that's exactly why I called Rush.
You know, I was listening the other day, and you had a somebody represented in South as a full longtime caller, and I think he was.
And he said that you thought that uh Southerners were Hicks and Hayseeds.
Remember that?
Yeah.
I don't which I didn't say I said that's how the Democrats see them.
That's how liberals are.
Oh, I I know, I know.
And you know, one of my personal biggest frustrations is when I misunderstood.
And because like you, I'm uh, you know, I like to articulate uh articulate uh conservative positions and everything, and I just wanted to say that we are out here.
We're out here, we're listening to you, we get you.
We understand you, and uh thank you very much for putting up with what must be a very difficult thing.
Well being misunderstood.
You know that the day some days it affects me in more days than it uh than it doesn't.
I'm uh here.
Another great example.
If you happen to be listening for the first time today, and you hear this, you have no clue what he's talking about.
What do you mean rush these callers have to call and encourage him and buck him up because he thinks people don't understand him, and that's right, because he's stupid.
That's what the first day tuna reads.
What he's talking about was that I went through a one-hour brilliant piece of analysis about something, and the first or second call we took was from a guy who said he had listened to it, who totally misunderstood it, who claimed he was a regular listener.
I think he was a seminar caller from what was about Dingy Harry.
It's about Dingy Harry and Blogo and the call that Dingy Harry made to Blogo saying you didn't want the three black people at Blogo was thinking about nominating to fill Obama's Senate seat.
That's what it was.
And I did say, people were talking about how depressed they were that day.
I said I'm the one who ought to be depressed.
I'm the one doing great radio programs here.
I am the one working my tail off, although it doesn't show.
Well, I am working my tail off each and every day to be the most informed uh what have you, and to have Nimrods like that not get it.
Yes, some days it's frustrating, but Gil, I always have the next hour.
I always have the next show program.
And it's uh it's it's a temporary thing when I get uh when I get discouraged.
It ends up inspiring me, motivating me even more.
Now, folks, just hot off the presses here from the Seattle Times today.
And uh, this story is a great opportunity for an abject lesson in conservatism and in liberalism.
Starbucks has purchased a 45 million dollar jet, a G550.
They did this last Month.
They already had two jets.
They had a jet from Bombardier, which is either a Global Express or a Challenger.
And they also had a G five, so this is their third corporate jet.
They're trying to sell the G5 since they got the G550.
The G550, it says here costs 45 million dollars.
We'll wink at that.
They say it costs 45 million dollars.
Now the interesting thing here is is that Starbucks bought it took delivery.
They actually bought it four years ago.
That's how long you're in line to get one.
But they um took delivery last month.
Well, maybe they I think that yeah, they did take deliveries.
About the same time that they told their employees it's reconsidering how much it'll match in their 401k plans and closing Starbucks stores, and laying off people, obviously.
What's the correct reaction to this?
Think about it.
Back in just a second.
After having the jet on order for four years, they took delivery last December, and the first trip was a two-weeker to Hawaii.
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