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Jan. 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:44
January 8, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Now look at that graphic on Fox.
Obama warns it soon may be too late to save the economy.
Now that the only way that's true is if Obama gets done everything he wants to get done in it, too late to save the economy.
Why Stoke fear that?
That's absurd.
Hang it.
Greetings, my friends.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Great to have you with us.
Fastest three hours in media.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
Email address.
Lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a powerful, influential member of the media.
I, of course, have access to things that other people do not.
And I recently received the first four episodes of the new season, season seven of 24, which premieres on Sunday.
Two nights on Sunday, two nights on Monday, a total of four hours.
I watched these four episodes.
And everybody thought last season kind of slacked off a little bit.
And then we've had the writer's strike.
So we went a whole year, a whole TV season without 24.
It's back.
And I have to tell you, it is stupendous.
It is so good.
I'll just tell you how it opens.
It opens with a bunch of pontificating, pompous buffoons of a Senate committee interrogating Jack Bauer, trying to put him in jail for torture.
And then all hell breaks loose.
And that's as far as I'm going to go.
But it is just, it is, it is just tremendous.
Some of you who thought that 24 kind of lost its focus and direction in the last season, you will say 24 is back.
And by the way, there is no CTU.
There is a new Chloe, even though Chloe is still in this one.
There's two Chloe's.
But it opens in Washington.
Most of the first action takes place in Washington, not in California.
It's well, well worth your time.
I also received as a special bonus a Jack Bauer action figure doll in a jail breaking out or some sort of a wire enclosure.
I'm going to send it to one of my nieces or nephews and let them tear it up in 10 minutes.
But anyway, it's well worth your time.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, in case you're just joining us, your welfare recipient just getting out of bed, one of those fortunate to receive a tax cut in the Obama Save American Economy plan, I have a question.
And there really is only one answer to this, and I'm not going to provide it right off the bat.
This is a teachable moment.
Starbucks, three or four years ago, ordered a Gulfstream G550.
They already had two jets.
They had a Gulfstream 5, and they had some jet from Bombardier.
So they took delivery in December of their G550, which wink wink, this story in the Seattle Times says cost $45 million.
We'll let that pass.
At the time, ladies and gentlemen, they took delivery of the G550, they happened to be closing a lot of stores.
This is right before Christmas.
They took delivery of the G550 that they ordered four years ago.
You go buy one if you don't find somebody who's got a position that's willing to sell it, then you're four years.
That's how brisk Gulfstream's business is.
They bought it four years ago in the height of economic robustness.
They take delivery.
In the story, it says they tried to get out of the position.
They tried to cancel delivery.
They said it'd be too expensive.
Now, I know a little bit about this.
And I happen to know that had they wanted to sell, because there are people that don't want to wait four years for an airplane.
And they're out there and they are making it known they're out there.
If Starbucks really wanted to get out of this, they could have done so at a profit.
They could have sold that position for $55 to $60 million.
They could have done that.
So I don't know.
Maybe there's people, who's it?
Melissa Allison.
She may not know anything about this.
She's just telling them what Starbucks said.
Anyway, anyway, not the point.
Just correcting the drive-bys.
It's my job, man.
So they take delivery of this $45 million jet.
At the same time, they're closing stores, which is firing people.
And they're also reducing contributions or considering reducing contributions, how much they match in their employee 401k plans.
Two weeks after taking delivery, they flew the G5.
Somebody did, they can't find the records.
Somebody flew it to Hawaii on a combined business pleasure trip.
The spokesman for Starbucks declined to say who took the jet to Hawaii, but said it was a combined personal and business trip.
She pointed out Starbucks policy requires employees to reimburse the company for personal use of the jet.
That policy was instituted in fiscal 2007 when the corporate chairman Howard Schultz reimbursed the company $400,919 for personal flights that he took on the jet.
Now, there is a simple question that I, El Rushbo, am throwing out there.
What is the correct reaction?
And I'm going to give you a little hint.
Forget public relations.
Because the public relations answer here is very simple.
They should have canceled a jet, not closed the stores.
But that's, you know, forget the tone deaf.
Forget the tone deaf because that's an easy answer.
It's also the incorrect answer.
What's the answer?
What is the correct response to this?
In terms of liberty, freedom, the Constitution, conservatism, what is the correct response to this?
Don't just mouth it in there, Dawn.
Okay, okay, she was mouthing her guess, her wild guess, as to the correct reaction.
What's the correct reaction to this?
Now, another thing, I just find this hilarious.
Oh, oh, speaking of coffee.
One Chicago public scruples manager may have really been jonesing for a cup of coffee when officials say she spent nearly $70,000 of the district's money to buy 30 cappuccino espresso machines for a high-screw program.
Five months after the machines were purchased, 22 remained unopened, one disappeared, stolen, and three were being used at two schools, though not in the culinary arts program for which they were intended.
You got to be kidding me.
We hear these stories about how these schools are bankrupt.
They don't have any money, and yet they're going out there and buying espresso machines in cappuccino for kids to learn how to make it in class.
No, how stupid do they think we are?
Remember, this is the same school system.
I don't know if these schools are involved.
This is the same school system where the students went on strike because they were getting a rotten education.
Chicago schools, espresso machines, a waste of money, Inspector report.
They needed an inspector to tell us this.
This is like when I was on vacation.
When I was on vacation, this just was the most, this is the funniest thing I'd seen in a long time.
It ran on the Politico.
Who ran it?
I forget who ran it.
Might have been Mike Allen.
Remember on December 23rd, late in the day, might have been the 24th, Obama released a report, his lawyer Greg Craig, on how many people in campaign had talked to Blago and were on the wiretaps about selling the feet.
And the Politico actually ran a headline.
Obama report clears Obama.
And I said, these people are serious.
They might as well rewritten the headline.
Obama clears self in probe.
And that was it.
That was good enough for him.
In a related matter, something that's just as hilarious.
Who has hired Joe the Plumber, Fox?
Somebody has hired Joe the Plumber to go to Iraq and be a reporter.
I just saw him interviewed by Martha McCallum on Fox.
They want an average guy's perspective on reportage from Iraq.
And of course, the drive-bys are having a fit.
They hate Joe the Plumber anyway because Joe the Plumber exposed Obama's redistributionist plans.
But then there was the infobabe Kira Phillips, who works at CNN.
She just went off.
She lost it yesterday or recently talking about Joe the Plumber.
No experience, has no clue what he's doing.
This is an outrage to journalism.
And I just had to sit there and laugh.
These poor journalists like Janet Cook, Jason Blair, and all these other fake, phony reporters that have made it up, plagiarized.
These people have the audacity to get bed out of shape when somebody they think isn't a journalist and isn't a reporter gets hired to go do a gig.
You people in drive-bys, I have been putting up with this crap for 20 years, and I don't complain about it.
For 20 years, I've had to watch people in my business hire callers who've never been in a radio studio to be hosts.
And then after they hire them, think they're the best thing in the world when they're literally insane.
I've had to watch doctors, lawyers, nurses, shrinks, automobile mechanics, people who have the slightest idea about broadcasting, get hired as hosts and get national syndication.
And they roll out on 50 radio stations with a combined audience of the number of people in the thimble, and they're reported to have a national show.
Have I complained about it?
Hell no.
Joe the Plumber gets it.
It was a conservative website, PJTV, or PajamasTV.com had hired Joe the Plumber.
Well, they're getting a lot of mileage out of this.
They ought to send Sarah Palin with him if they really want to tick off the drive-bys.
We are back.
Rush Limbaugh talent on lawn from God.
And we go back to the fawns to Big Stone City, South Dakota.
This is Dana.
Nice to have you here.
Yes, thank you, Rush.
I think there's one thing that everybody's leaving out of the situation on the economic problem.
And if it wasn't for 9-11, where would we be in this problem today?
Would we have this economic problem?
And then they've demonized.
Yes, we would.
Well, they've demonized the war on the bottom.
Do you think giving loans to people who can't afford to pay them back has anything to do with 9-11?
You just subprime mortgage scandal, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
Do you think all of these financial institutions who had no money because they'd leveraged 30 to 1 on debt would have done anything differently if it hadn't been for 9-11?
Well, you're right.
But I'm just saying there's resources out there.
They've demonized the war on terror.
We can't even take advantage of the fruit of our victory.
I mean, there's oil out there.
We wouldn't have had $4 a gallon oil if we were allowed to use oil from Iraq from the war.
We wouldn't be in that mess.
But they've demonized the whole war on terror.
We can't, I mean, they didn't demonize, they don't demonize our space program, and that came from carpet bombing Germany.
I mean, we got technology from Germany.
I don't look at the space shuttle and say, oh, man, you know why that's up there?
It's because we've carpet bombed Germany.
But, you know, we can't take the oil from Iraq.
That's wrong.
And that doesn't make sense to me.
And I think economically we'd be in a lot better shape if we could.
Well, in that sense, I mean, I understand what you're saying, if we hadn't had to spend so much on energy to conduct the war.
But, you know, really, to a certain extent, but you're talking about a drop in the ocean here.
The military uses X amount of jet fuel, kerosene, whatever.
They get first dibs on a lot of things to be ready to do things like Iraq every year.
Even if they don't use it, they still take it.
It's in reserve.
So where 9-11 is not viewed in the proper perspective is it was an economic disaster, and we came back from it.
That's the thing that everybody missed when talking about George W. Bush and the never-ending criticism.
We were just coming out of a minor little blip of a recession, an economic downturn when Clinton left office.
Then 9-11 hit, and we had a robust rebound.
But this crisis that we're talking about is due.
You can trace it to the subprime business, which gave us the housing bubble, which has now caused all kinds of loss in the value and the price of homes.
It would have happened whether there was 9-11 or not.
This is Dan in Sonoma, California.
Great to have you here.
Hello, sir.
Hello, Rush.
Thanks so much.
Ditto's from Beautiful Sonoma.
Thank you.
Obama in his speech mentioned that the trillion-dollar deficits will be with us for many years.
That's right.
What he fails to mention is that he helped vote for the near billion-dollar bailout.
So in essence, he is trying to correct a problem he helped create.
Yes.
But you see, here's the way I look at that.
Okay, so we're going to have a trillion-dollar deficit.
And that deficit, this deficit spending.
By the way, when Republicans are deficit spending, it's a monster.
It's got to be slain.
It's got to be killed.
Deficit's going to ⁇ this is going to be the end of us.
Now, deficit spending is fine.
Deficit spending is good.
In fact, folks, let me show you how out of whack things have become.
Just this week, just this week, ladies and gentlemen, New York, in fact, it was just yesterday.
New York Times had a story on it's now mainstream thought.
More and more government spending as economic stimulus, as normal day-to-day procedure, is mainstream.
Oh, yeah?
When did this happen?
Oh, it happened overnight.
Crap it overnight.
That's what happens when you've got Democrats in Congress, Democrats soon to be in the White House, and a Democrat-run media.
In fact, in fact, just go back a year or so and listen to the Bush deficits being ripped to shreds during the campaign.
Now, all of a sudden, mainstream to spend this kind of money, mainstream to print it.
In fact, in fact, ladies and gentlemen, do you know what the big challenge now is?
Can the government spend it fast enough?
That's what the media is now asking.
The crisis depends on the government spending it fast enough.
You realize this happened inside of a month.
50 years of economic thought just reversed 180 degrees inside of a month in Philadelphia.
Andrew, hello, sir.
You're next on the EIB network.
Rush, thank you for taking my call.
I'm curious because Mayor Michael Nutter just met with Barack and has a plan to use some of this $1.2 trillion to spend on the Philadelphia zoo.
And just this week, they announced that they were going to be closing 11 libraries, saving $8 million.
Why are we not keeping those libraries open and also some fire stations?
Easy.
What are we talking about here?
We're talking about Philadelphia, right?
That is correct.
When was the last time you went to the library?
I actually frequent it quite often.
All right.
Well, how many people are in there when you go?
Not very many.
Yeah.
You ever been to the zoo lately?
I have not.
Go.
You'll be standing in line to get in as people are asked to name the new Jaguar Cub or feed the dolphins or whatever animals they have in the Philadelphia Zoo.
The animals are at great risk from global warming.
We may not see these animals anymore if things keep going because they might become extinct.
But the internet, why Google has this massive project.
They're going to digitize every book ever published.
If they get their way, you're going to be able to access every book ever written.
What have got the fire station?
On the internet.
Fire station?
Yeah, they're closing fire stations down as well.
Well, that's just a trick to get you to pay more taxes.
That's how cities and governments do it.
They close down these vital services rather than all the waste like the cappuccino machines and so forth.
That's just designed to get you to agree to more spending, more taxes, so I don't have to close the fire station or the police station.
And yet, at the other end of the day, there's another.
But see, there's.
I must apologize, but I forgot one thing.
Forgive me.
It's going to take me a while to make this rote.
There aren't going to be any arson fires because Obama's president.
There's going to be so much love.
The existing fire departments can handle the accidents.
Meeting and surpassing all audience expectations all the time, every day.
Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Richmond, Virginia.
This is Sandra.
Sandra, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call, and thank you and Snerley for being individualist, much as myself.
I need your help.
Yeah.
I'm a fairly new listener.
Just started last year when the election really got kicking good.
And I realized I need to get more involved.
How can an individual like I, who's an individualist and believe in individuals and, you know, the American way, how can we stop what we just heard this morning?
Well, see, it's a great, great question because you have to have realistic goals.
It may not be possible.
I don't know how we're going to stop this for a couple of years.
No, no, no.
Hear me out on this, Sandra, because this is a very important question.
Elections have consequences.
I don't know how we're going to stop this.
I haven't seen yet any evidence from our Republican, Senate, and House minorities that they're really interested in stopping any of it.
What I've seen so far, and it's going too far, it's out of hand.
There are too many people who are saying we need to step aside and halt our criticism.
We need to hope the new president and his administration have success and so forth.
We want to work together with them.
This is politics and it's the future of the country.
And this is not how these guys are going to win votes in 2010.
This plan that Obama has, anybody who's on our side of the aisle, who has any degree of education and experience and knowledge of history knows full well the disaster that awaits us.
He's going to get 95% of what he wants early on, folks, because of this attitude.
The Republicans, oh, we hope he succeeds.
Oh, we can't be seen as critics.
Oh, no, no, no, that will not help us with the minority vote in 2010, 2012.
All it's bunk.
We stand up for what's right and what we believe in, or we cave.
Right now, our side is in cave mode, and they're out of fear.
That means, Sandra, it's up to us, as it always is.
So what can you do?
Well, I'm going to tell you three things that you can do.
And number one, and this is true for every one of us out there, you have got to stand firm in what you believe in, live your life that way, vote when you have the chance to vote that way, and you have to not be afraid to talk to people who disagree with you about it.
This, look, the people who care about this are the ones that have the chance to make changes.
The people out there watching MTV and doing, forget them because they're not engaged.
They show up every election and vote.
Now, don't forget them, but that's another thing we've got to do.
We've got to somehow assert ourselves into the popular culture.
Popular culture right now is just accepted as liberal.
There's not any contention.
There's no disagreement.
And the people that only know America via popular culture are seeing nothing but anti-Republican, anti-conservative, anti-Bush, pro-liberal, pro-cultural, rot-pro.
They see it all over the place all the time.
They think it's normal.
Anybody who disagrees with it is the enemy.
It's unrealistic to expect those people every election day to all of a sudden go in and vote for a conservative.
So that's a project.
A guy named Andrew Breitbart and his website in California is spearheading that with some help from others.
But what can you do, Sandra?
Don't live in a cocoon.
You have no idea how many people you will influence just by virtue of the way you live your life, just by virtue of the way you communicate with people.
If you believe in it, try to change people's minds.
It may lead to some arguments.
You may think it's pointless.
You may think it's fruitless.
Another thing to do is keep listening to this program.
And I say this in all sincerity.
This program will keep you inspired, motivated, and happy.
This program will keep you armed.
This program, my newsletter, website, this pro will keep you up to speed.
And it will give you the inspiration to continue to go out and do this.
It's this country we're talking about, right?
It's talking about the things we believe in, the future.
For those of you that have kids and grandkids, now I've got nieces and nephews.
You care about the future.
This is what it's all about.
Now, we're heading to a disaster here.
And depending on how deep this disaster penetrates our country, it could take a generation to turn this stuff around.
If they get national health care, folks, that's a big, they're going to get Supreme Court nomination.
This told you before the election, this stuff matters.
Elections have consequences.
Okay, yeah, we're in a hole.
But I'm not going over the bus when it goes over the cliff.
Now, I mentioned yesterday, here's something else you can do.
This, something I did, you know, a lot of people have asked me, where'd you learn?
What was that?
Somebody is attempting to distract your host, but it shall not fly.
People ask me all the time, what did you do?
How did you learn what you learned?
Well, family, obviously.
But man, there's so much brilliant conservative thought out there, and a lot of people have heard about it.
A lot of people haven't.
A lot of people don't have access to it.
Let me, we've got a new partner here at EIB, the Heritage Foundation.
These are people working, they're think tank specialists, scholars, scientists, economists, demographers.
And they are brilliant.
And they work, some of them, in the basements of anonymity, churning stuff out that if you can have access to it, a world of knowledge is open to you that you didn't know existed.
You're not going to find this stuff in the mainstream media.
You're not going to find it in the library.
You're not going to find it in the places you would normally seek to go.
They've got a website called askheritage.org, www.askheritage.org.
You can become a member of this.
There are 400,000 people who are all across the country.
Go to this website.
We've linked to it also at rushlinblog.com.
Askheritage.org.
Ask them anything.
And they'll find the answer to your question in all of the digitized research on their servers.
I mean, it's just waiting.
This stuff is not taught in schools.
This is crucial.
If you're a homeschooler, askheritage.org.
And I've talked about the Heritage Foundation over the years because they have been invaluable to me.
You know, I'm an instinctive conservative.
I've always been, I always knew what conservative was, conservatism was.
I always knew what liberalism was.
I always never have had any doubts.
What people like the Heritage Foundation enabled me to do was to explain and understand why my instincts are what they were and my family as well, of course.
But you can't just have one source.
www.askheritage.org.
This is a gold mine, my friends.
And it's just, wait, will you see it?
Way of you join and play around with this.
It's, I mean, from any topic you want on conservatism, be it the economy, foreign policy, war on terror, military matters.
They've got perhaps one of the greatest libraries on Ronald Reagan.
You wonder what would Reagan do in a circumstance if that intrigues you?
Askheritage.org.
So Sandra does all kinds of things you can do, but all of the rest of you, just interact with people and don't be afraid to be who you are.
And be prepared to have people offended by how confident you are in what you believe.
That's something that offends people more than anything else.
Most people don't have the confidence to think they're sure of things.
When you come along and you're sure of things, that's going to intimidate people.
Nobody could be that sure.
Because everybody's been conditioned to think that there are two sides to everything.
There aren't.
There's right and there's wrong.
And wrong is invalid.
And we don't have to give wrong the time of day just to be fair.
Just like we don't have to give evil the time of day just to be fair.
Just like we don't have to give defeat a chance on the battlefield just to be fair.
But so many people are so wishy-washy.
Well, you know, I can understand why we should have.
But on the other hand, I don't think we should have ten.
Now, on the other hand, you get frustrated dealing with these people, but it can be worth it.
All right, a quick timeout.
We'll be back and continue after this.
The EIB network.
Yeah, after we play Soundbite 11, I want to grab Soundbite 17.
You got to hear this.
Last night on CNBC Reports, John Harwood was interviewing the one, the Messiah, the Most Merciful.
Barack Obama said the notion that the United States tolerates torture.
Do you expect it to be difficult and complicated to affect that change?
To define exactly what is and isn't torture?
Guantanamo, I'm going to close.
How we do that is not simple because we have people who have been detained there, many of them who actually may be dangerous.
So we've got to do very careful reviews of how we do that.
This, this, this is incredible.
That had to be heard to be believed.
Some of these guys at Club Gitmo may actually be bad guys.
We never thought of that.
We just thought of poor innocent Islamists being tortured.
You mean Bush wasn't making it all up, Barry?
So the word torture equals Club Gitmo.
Has this government admitted that it tortured?
Has Bush admitted there was torture?
Has Cheney admitted there was torture?
Where did this notion?
Abu Grab is where the torture stems from, isn't it?
This notion that we engage in torture all the time, another one of these myths, these liberal myths has been promulgated out there, promulgated, and it's established itself now as a reality when I don't think it is.
They had all the living presidents in the Oval Office yesterday.
They had H.W. Bush, and they had Obama in there.
I thought this is funny, too.
They asked some of these guys, what do you think is going to go on at his private lunch?
Oh, I'm sure Obama will be asking a lot of questions.
I say, you do not understand.
Obama's not going to ask anybody anything.
He doesn't think he's got anything to learn.
These guys are all goofballs to him.
He's going to be telling them what for.
At any rate.
So you had Bush in there.
You had the two Bushes in there.
You had Jimmy Carter.
You had Obama and President Clinton, who maneuvered himself in the line so he's standing next to Bush 43.
That ensured he was in the center of the picture.
Now there is camera noise, and this is a two-second soundbite.
This is Bill Clinton in the Oval Office yesterday.
I love this rug.
You didn't hear what he said?
Did you understand it, Brian?
What about you, Snerdley?
Well, let's play it again until you get it.
It's just two seconds.
I want you to think El Camino and Astroturf.
Okay.
I love this rug.
Did you hear that?
He's, I love this rug.
I love this rug.
He's back in the Oval Office.
The last time he's in there with, you know, the Lewinsky stuff, he's back in the Oval Office.
What does he notice?
A notice is the rug.
Okay, we had three people that wanted to take a stab on answering my Starbucks corporate jet question, but for some reason they vamonosed.
They skedaddled.
They decamped.
They got out of there.
But all three had the same answer.
Here's the brief recap and then the question.
Starbucks, owner already of two corporate airplanes, three years ago orders a G550, cost $50 or $45 million, wink wink.
And they took delivery of the jet in December, just before Christmas.
The jet was flown to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays.
In December, Starbucks also announced the closure of numerous Starbucks stores and announced to their employees who were left that they were thinking of reducing the match in their 401k contributions.
I asked the question, what is the correct response to this?
Because the Seattle Times running the story takes the predictable route.
What a bunch.
I mean, they're no different than the GE and the Ford and Chrysler guys.
How dare they fly to Washington corporate jets asking for bailouts?
These guys, why, they're tone deaf.
They're insensitive.
How dare that they take a new corporate jet when they're laying people off and the horror clothing store.
And that, my friends, is what passes today for the correct response.
Class envy, sensitivity.
The correct response to this is it's none of anybody's business.
If Starbucks, if Howard Schultz, as a good liberal, wants to own three corporate airplanes purchased with the profits of Latte, Cinnamon, Cappuccino Supreme, or whatever the hell they sell in there.
And if he increases his profits by firing fellow liberal employees and closing Starbucks stores in liberal neighborhoods and increases his profitability by reducing the match in the 401ks, it's his and a board of directors' business.
It's not ours and they can do whatever they want to do.
That is the correct response.
But Rush, but Rush, what about laying off those interest?
None of our business.
It's none of the U.S. government's business.
The reason I brought this up is because this is exactly the kind of thing now that people in government, Republicans and Democrats, are trying to regulate out of existence.
People are not going to be, if they want to run their business that way, if they want to fire all these liberals, if these good-hearted liberals want to behave in this cold-hearted way at Christmas time and then fly this new jet over, it's nobody's business.
Zip Zero Nada.
Now, if you want to say it's stupid, if you want to say it's bad PR, fine and dandy.
But nobody has the right to go in there and make them sell the jet, rehire the people, and reopen the stores.
It's none of our business.
I might have mispronounced a portion of the heritage address.
It's www.askheritage.org, not dot com, and askheritage.org.
I thought I said it right.
All right, well, somebody said, anyway, never mind.
And says, Joe the Plumber, I guess, is going to Israel to report on the Gaza, the Gazukas there against the Israelis rather than Iraq.
Been great today, folks, and great every day.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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