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Jan. 27, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
January 27, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Greetings to you music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plain.
Great to have you with us.
My name is Rush Limbaugh.
I am the man President Barack Obama has suggested that you not listen to.
I am the person Barack Obama has impugned as saying my way is not how things get done.
And from his perspective, he's exactly right.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
If you want to be on the program, the email address LRushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
Place soundbite number 23.
This is Charles Gasperino responding to a New York Times story or reporter on CNBC this morning about Merrill Lynch and their bathroom redecoration.
Anybody that defends that office?
The two people who I love that defended that office, well, one person I love is Rush Limbaugh, and he defended it purely like it was supply-side economics.
But that's not entirely true.
Yeah, I gave a supply-side economics lesson there.
But also, folks, the foundation for my philosophical reaction to the Merrill Lynch bathroom is freedom.
Freedom, this was not bailout money that they used.
Do you understand the degree to which freedom is under assault?
When the federal government is usurping trillions of dollars from the private sector and absorbing it themselves, along with those trillions goes some freedom.
You know, maybe, and I admire Charles Gasperino's work as well.
But I hope he doesn't mean that he thinks that all corporations have to submit their proposed expenses to Obama and to Carl Levin and whoever else before they actually spend the money.
But that's where we're headed.
And that's where we had a call from a citizen out in Aspen.
I want to know where they're going to spend the money.
Look at what's happening here.
The engine of freedom is being absorbed by the group of people who limit freedom by definition.
That's the government.
Bill of Rights.
You know, for the last few days in this country, and I've tried to make these teachable moments, for the last few days, we in this country have spent more time discussing the refurbishing of an office in Manhattan and the purchase of a private jet than we as a nation have discussed the responsibility of Barney Frank, who I just saw on television, opposing tax cuts, Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jay McGurellik in driving this nation into a housing and financial crisis.
The people who have gotten us where we are are being ignored.
They're being given a free ride.
They're being made members of the new administration, including some who are tax cheats, have nanny problems and so forth.
And nobody's focusing on that.
We're focused on a corporate jet.
We're focused on bathroom refurberations and so forth.
You ought to be more outraged by what's happening to your economy and your country than a corporate jet and a bathroom redecoration.
And look at this, the Financial Times, Thane called to testify on Meryl bonuses.
Okay, this guy has resigned, and they're going to bring him up here and they're going to flog this guy on paying bonuses.
He might have done it with TARP money.
I don't know.
If he did, he deserves what he gets.
This is what happens, folks.
This is a teachable moment.
When the federal government pays you to run your business, they run it.
And if you do things to embarrass them, they're going to call you up and they're going to destroy you.
This guy's name may as well be Robert Bork today.
His name may as well be Clarence Thomas.
This is what the Obama administration is about.
This is what the left has been about in this country for as long as I've been watching him, and that is destroying people who stand in their way of amassing federal power that is not theirs.
And nobody cares.
Nobody's standing up to oppose it.
This is why Obama mentioned my name, to divert everybody from what he's doing.
All these people saying, ah, Rush Obama's scared.
He's not scared of me.
He's the president of the United States.
He's not scared of me at all.
What he does know is I'm probably a louder voice of opposition than he's got anywhere else.
But to say he's scared with one signature, he could spell the end of this radio show and others as you've come to know it.
It may happen.
Who knows down the line?
Now, I want to take a brief departure.
I just saw something.
I was telling a staff about it.
This to me, I just adored.
It is media day at the Super Bowl.
The Arizona Cardinals trooped in there this morning.
It's at Raymond James Stadium.
And the Steelers are there now.
Steelers showed up about noon.
And, of course, they put their star players in their own little booths out on the field.
And then other players and coaches are up in the stands.
And the media can go talk to whoever they want to talk to.
The NFL network's televising this.
So during the last commercial break of the last hour I'm watching, when they finally got to Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and among the assembled horde of reporters is a young kid.
He looks to be, I don't know how to judge kids' ages, but I guess he's 10 or 12.
He may be a teenager.
And he looks like any character that you might see on a Fox Sunday Night cartoon series, the family guy or King of the Hill or what have you.
Just an average American who obviously won a contest to get in there.
He's got his little glasses on.
He's got his notebook and his tape recorder.
He's asking Roethlisberger questions.
And I swear, this kid was asking Roethlisberger better questions, questions I'm interested in the answers to more than any of the reporters that I saw.
I mean, the reporters are asking things like, so Ben, you said that you're in the first Super Bowl back in Detroit.
You were just nervous the whole game.
Do you expect to be nervous?
And he's already answered that, asked and answered last week, all weekend long.
And it's typical football question.
This kid says, Mr. Roethlisberger, I noticed that you wear all the plays every game on your left wrist.
How many plays do you have?
He said, oh, we have about 200 offensive plays that we have to remember, and they're all on here.
He said, well, you have most of them memorized.
Well, I pretty much know them, but this is there is a backup.
Then the kid said, well, who is the most important role model in your life?
And Roethlisberger said, in football or in life?
The kid said, no, in football.
And Roethlisberger said, my dad.
Well, I want to be just like my dad.
Then the kid asks him, do you ever play Madden, a video game?
Roethlisberger said, well, I did once in college.
I don't play it much.
And the kid says, well, I do.
And Rothlessberger says, well, what's your favorite team?
Which team do you like out there?
And the little kid says, Patriots.
And Roethlisberger says, well, that's a good team.
That's a good team.
And this kid's just having a time of his life.
He's getting some information from Roethlisberger that would not be gotten by some of these other reporters.
And it was just great.
It was a nice contrast to watch.
Folks, look at things.
Try to look at it this way, if you will.
The Citibank corporate jet And the Merrill Lynch bathroom refurberation means nothing to us.
It means not one substantive thing to you.
Whether they have a jet or not, at Starbucks, at Merrill Lynch, who matters nothing.
It won't make one bit of difference in your life.
Same thing if some of these guys want to remodel their offices for $1.2 million.
But the loss of trillions in the stock market, your plummeting 401ks, your savings account, your pension plans, the loss of value in the housing market.
This is what you ought to be angry about.
This affects you big time.
This affects you in matters of great substance.
This is your savings.
This is your life's work.
This is, for some of you, your job.
What ought to concern you is not the jets and not the bathrooms.
What ought to concern you is the hack politicians telling you and everyone else that they are better equipped to run this economy than the people who have been.
This is a diabolical, intricately woven web of deceit that is being executed and woven here.
And you have been sucked right into it.
If you're falling prey to all this class envy stuff, it's no different than when you think the rich ought to have their taxes raised.
Doesn't matter a hill of beans.
In fact, it can mean something bad for you.
Because then they're prone to hire fewer people and to pay fewer wages and raises, smaller.
After debacle after debacle after debacle, the question still arises, how can people have such faith in government to fix things?
And the answer, frustratingly, is there are just too many people now to whom big government means big benefits, means big results, means the government cares.
It's a sad place we've gotten to.
And this bunch, this, Obama is moving faster than I ever thought.
Lickety split.
This guy with his, we haven't talked about it yet, his speech, he ripped America again in his speech.
Well, his TV interview with Al-Arabiyah, his first formal interview as president is with Al-Arabiyah last night.
He says, too often the United States has dictated, I'm sending George Mitchell, my envoy, over to listen to you.
He said, problem in Israel is that the Israelis have occupied too many PLO settlements.
That's not the problem.
That hasn't happened in years.
The problem is the Palestinian and the Hamas, the Gazuka rockets being launched into Israel.
Well, too often the United States, we are not your enemy.
He says, when he make that speech to me, would Obama make a speech on, say, a conservative network and say, I am not your enemy?
Or would he say, you are my enemy?
Let's talk about casualties for just a second.
Casualties are mounting.
This matters.
This isn't a jet.
This isn't a redecorated bathroom.
Casualties are mounting across the United States.
Home Depot announced that they are killing off 7,000.
Sprint, killing off 8,000.
Pfizer, killing off 8,000 more.
Other companies, including Caterpillar, brought the total to 40,000 jobs killed in just one day.
Now, sadly, the number of casualties is expected to rise with no end in sight.
Economists are warning that we're just witnessing the tip of the iceberg here.
By the end of this year, 10% of America's workforce could be unemployed.
But that doesn't matter, does it?
Because we're not going to let City have their jet and we're going to make sure we get the money back for the redecorated bathroom.
Right?
10% of America's workforce could be unemployed, even if President Obama's trillion-dollar spending program is enacted.
We are told there will be a net loss of at least 2 million jobs more by the end of the year.
Even if, folks, he gets all of his trillion dollars.
Even with this dire forecast, a rapidly deteriorating labor market, our new president and his Democrat Congress are planning to kill even more jobs by demanding that automakers build green cars that nobody wants, by adopting draconian fuel standards to appease radical environmentalists.
At the local level, liberal state governments from California to New York to New Jersey are introducing new taxes as they refuse to rein in their budgets.
I wonder if the drive-by media will keep a running monthly tally of the Obama casualties in the same manner they did war casualties under George W. Bush.
Or if protesters will plant crosses on mock graves for every job killed under the Obama administration, will we have people protesting the loss of American treasure, the loss of American jobs?
Will we have people camping out across the street from Obama's house in Chicago as they camped across the street from Bush's place in Crawford?
40,000 jobs killed in one day.
The Obama administration tells us we're going to lose 2 million more this year, even if he gets what he wants.
Now, for those of you who think this is an unfair question, perhaps an unfair analogy, let me remind you: we are talking about lives here.
We are not talking about jets.
We are not talking about bathroom refurbishing.
We are talking about what was once entrepreneurial freedom that's being usurped.
We are trying to take these incidents as teachable moments to illustrate that what's happening here is nothing more than a giant usurpation of trillions of dollars of private sector wealth transferred to the government and then parceled out by that government on the basis of who they think ought to have it.
They will pick winners and losers.
We're talking about 40,000 people's lives in one day.
Their identities, their dreams, their hopes, and their jobs.
Casualties.
And there is a war going on.
These are casualties in war.
And I'm going to tell you what the war is.
This is the Obama war on prosperity.
40,000 jobs dead in one day.
You know, this Pelosi business of funding abortion being part of the stimulus, contraception being part of the stimulus, fewer people means economic growth.
This thing went away way too fast.
Nobody fought for this other than Bob Wexler, a congressman from Florida who lives in Maryland.
It looks like that this might have been a House Democrat leadership plan.
I'm not so sure that Obama ever bought into this because Obama canceled it with the slightest bit of attention.
Now, folks, this is also instructive.
What if there were this kind of attention paid to every item in this stimulus bill?
All it took was one day of people realizing that Nancy Pelosi actually said that killing babies in the womb was economic stimulus.
And once it was framed that way, because she allowed it to happen Sunday on her TV appearance, the Obama administration had no choice but then to broom it.
Okay, so now we've got $4 billion of stimulus for Acorn, community organizing groups for neighborhood stabilization programs, voter fraud organizations.
We are $4 billion to pay for Obama's ground machine, the get out the vote bunch, the fraudulent voter registration.
What else?
You've seen the list of items that are in this that have nothing to do with economic stimulus, that it's porculus.
What if every item in this got the same scrutiny that Pelosi's idiocy got?
Where would we be looking at something far different?
Because you see, when the media gets close to doing their job, the American people win.
It just doesn't happen very much.
Bernie Goldberg, new book out.
He refers to it as a slobbering love affair between the media and Obama.
$400 million for NASA climate change research in a stimulus bill.
$650 million for digital TV converter box coupons.
I mean, and by the way, this is now going to get us up to $2 trillion, not one.
People are forgetting all the stimuli and bailouts that occurred throughout calendar 2008.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act won a $41 billion to the local school districts, $1.1 billion to Amtrak, $600 million into buying energy-efficient cars for the federal government, which will double what they spend on the fleet now.
Are you Rush Limbaugh?
Don't doubt me, resisting the tug of popular sentiment.
We've got to get to the phones here in just a second.
Obama just left the Capitol.
He just finished his meeting with Republican leaders up there trying to get him to go along with his stimulus package.
Now, I want to explore something in a little detail that I brought up yesterday.
Obama does not need a single Republican vote in the House to get his stimulus bill.
He just needs two votes in the Senate to get it.
He does not need Republican vote.
He won, he said.
He can trump them.
He wants, why does he want Republicans on board?
Why does he want Republicans on board with this when he can do it without them?
If this, folks, I'm serious about this, if it's such a great plan, if this stimulus is such a great plan, then why not take sole authorship of it as the Democrat Party so that when it works, you can then really finish off the Republicans.
And when it works, you can say, and this prosperity was brought to you by Obama and the stimulus package, and not one Republican helped out.
Not one Republican thought it would.
That would be the end of the Republican Party as we know it.
So why doesn't he do it if he's so confident it's going to work?
Because he's not confident it's going to work in the way you hope it works.
It's going to work for what he has in mind, but it ain't going to work in the ways you hope.
It's going to work in building and strengthening the Democrat Party for as long as we live.
It's going to grow the government.
It's going to make the government the sole focus of the United States of America.
Not individual citizens exercising their daily lives with individual freedom.
But there's also another reason.
And it isn't, it's largely about political cover.
And I think, by the way, you probably have seen, if you are one who reads the internet and websites daily, you've probably seen some of the most personal and vicious articles written about me ever from mainstream reporters.
It's vicious.
It borders on, I hope he gets cancer and dies.
It borders on why did Tim Russert have to be the one to get the heart attack?
And these are from names that you know.
These are from journalists, columnists, both local and national.
Now, they're really irritated.
I thought I was irrelevant now.
I thought all Republicans were irrelevant.
Why all this victory all aimed at me?
This has nothing to do, by the way.
Well, some of it has to do with Obama mentioning my name because it just makes them mad.
Just makes them mad.
They wish that I would just vanish.
So Obama mentions me and it makes them mad.
There's a little professional jealousy thrown in, but a lot of it is issues.
Let's go back to 1993 for the answer to this: why Obama wants Republican votes, why he wants a quote-unquote bipartisan bill.
The fear that these people are expressing, I think, is rooted in 1993.
Bill Clinton passed, and if you remember this, my memory is long.
Bill Clinton passed his economic pact, the tax increase, the retroactive tax increase on people after he'd worked so hard for a middle-class tax cut and couldn't bring it off.
He did that without any Republican support.
Do you remember my friends?
That tax increase went through with, I mean, there was hardly any Republican support on that.
He tried a few other things without Republican support.
While this was going on, here we were.
I was being made an honorary member of the House freshman class in 1994, and there was a distinct conservative message.
And that distinct conservative message, coupled with the fact that not one Republican had compromised his conservatism by agreeing with Clinton's tax increase, allowed for a great contrast to be drawn.
And along with a lot of other factors, the Republicans won the House for the first time in 40 years in 1993 in the elections, in 1994.
That's what they are afraid of.
The reason Obama mentioned my name, the reason Obama is desperate to have Republican support for this is to see to it that what happened in 1993 does not happen here in 2009.
And that is that no conservative alternative supported by the Republican Party is to get traction.
If he can co-opt the Republicans, if he can co-opt McConnell and a number of Republicans in the Senate to go along with him on this, then when this blows up, they're on record with him as being responsible for it blowing up.
It is why it's crucial that they hold out.
Because Obama doesn't need a single Republican vote in the House to get what he wants, and he only needs a couple in the Senate.
And that couple is just to break cloture.
It's all he needs.
Two Republicans.
Republicans have got to hold firm on this.
They have got to hold out on this.
Let Obama go alone like Clinton went alone in 1993.
That's what Obama and the Democrats don't want to happen.
They want the Republican Party co-opted under the term bipartisan, and they want conservative opposition relegated to what people are going to be led to believe is a fringe little band of people out there would barely see them.
It's so small and they're so fringe.
So while he's trying to co-opt trillions of dollars of the U.S. economy, he's trying to wipe out the conservative movement in the Republican Party.
The last people to see this or what it is are the Republicans themselves.
They are so cowed by fear of other things, and they're so cowed by language and so forth that they've got big decision to make.
And that's why Obama's romancing them, and it's why he's taking, I'm watching the press go, wow, we never saw Bush come up here work with Democrats.
We never saw a president.
No, where's Obama?
He really reaching out.
He's a really new kind of guy.
He's trying to co-opt them.
He's trying to destroy them.
He is trying to make sure that he still wins when this stimulus package bombs.
Larry in Kansas City, Kansas.
As we go back to the phones, glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Well, Rook, I just want to say that I'm definitely a part of your 1% club.
Article 1, Section 8, and the 9th and 10th Amendment basically say in plain terms, Congress, keep your hands off the private sector and the free markets.
There's nowhere in the Constitution where it says that they have the right for bailouts to take control of the private sector.
I applaud what you're doing and count me in that 1%.
If people want to buy a jet, let them buy a jet.
Well, you know, there have been people raise questions about the constitutionality of the bailouts on the basis that you've mentioned, but somebody's got to bring the case.
Somebody's got to bring that.
Nobody's going to bring the case that it's unconstitutional on whatever grounds that you decide.
Therefore, we're back to where we always are.
The constant informing and educating of the American people.
And by the way, we're talking about hope and change.
I'm really looking for some hope and change.
And one of my big hopes is that at some point enough Americans finally wake up and say, wait a minute, we're fed up with the way you people are spending money here.
We can hope.
We just had a campaign on it.
And I'm hoping.
And I'm hoping for immediate change.
And I'll tell you this, the President of the United States hopes I fail.
Try that.
America's truth detector.
America's Doctor of Democracy.
Serving humanity on the EIB network.
Back to the phones to Gross Point, Michigan.
This is Janet.
Janet, hi.
Nice to have you with us.
Hello, last man standing.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
You're welcome.
Let us re-educate the American people on Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.
If Carl Levin were a competent senator, his comments tonight would not have been about a jet.
It would have been about what his president did yesterday to the American car makers, how our president gave the foreign automakers an unfair advantage.
Our American car companies now have to hold to ridiculous cafe standards that their foreign competition do not.
That, after we just gave both GM and Chrysler how much in bailout money?
Well, that's precisely why Carl Levin can do it.
I know.
Yeah, Carl Levin, Jennifer Granholm, they're really doing a lot for Michigan, aren't they?
Rush, now you have to get your little graph people going, and you have to put the year that Rush, that Carl Levin got into office and how well Michigan was doing, and chart Michigan's growth against Carl Levin's time in office.
However, wait a second here.
This is a serious question here, Janet.
Yes.
What good would my little glass people doing a chart?
What good would it do if the people living there with their own life experiences don't understand what's happening to them right in their daily lives each and every day?
What good's my chart going to do?
You are a brilliant man.
You are absolutely correct.
People in America do not understand that the city of Detroit enjoys a 49% adult illiteracy rate.
They can't read the newspaper.
Yeah, but they can all vote Democrat.
Exactly.
Exactly.
They all know what the letter D looks like.
Is that really an accurate stat?
49% are illiterate.
Yes, it is.
In the city of Detroit.
21% of the kids graduate from, that go into kindergarten graduate.
only 21% for the last 25 years.
And Detroit...
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm confused.
21% don't pass kindergarten?
No, 21% of the children that enter kindergarten in the Detroit public school system have made it out of high school.
Only 21% have graduated.
For 25 years.
70% of the college educated leave Michigan annually.
Rush, this is what they want to do to America, what they've done to Michigan.
But, Janet, all the tax increases that were supposed to solve all these problems.
Yes.
Nothing's going to help Detroit.
Nothing.
I mean.
I can't believe these numbers.
These numbers are 49% adult illiteracy.
In the city limits of Detroit.
800,000 residents, a little more than that.
We're talking.
What's the literacy rate in Gross Point and Gross Point Park?
Oh, well, probably 98.2.
I mean, we have one of the best.
What's the literacy rate in Ann Arbor?
There's a university.
Oh, well, probably 112.
What about Lansing?
Lansing has issues, but it's probably.
So obviously you went to Michigan.
No, no, no.
I'm not from here.
That's why I'm not blind to it.
Oh, oh.
I married a Michigan.
Jesus, these are still hard numbers.
49% of adults in Detroit cannot read.
Yes, and then go back to the Detroit news before Christmas announcing their financial problems.
And when you've got a city where a couple of hundred thousand people don't cannot read a paper, no wonder an institution like the Detroit News is suffering.
It's not just a- That's right.
You know, the Detroit news and the free press are going to three days a week.
Right.
And that's not.
Funny papers are not enough to save them.
And we don't have selfish.
Now, you still have to read the words in the balloons.
I know.
I mean, this is what they want to do to Michigan.
Rush, I don't know if you know this, but the city of Detroit does not run a Republican, has not run for mayor, has not run a Republican for almost 40 years.
They run two Democrats against each other.
No one has been able to explain me how they pulled that one off.
And you want me to do a chart with glass with graphs and everything.
This is what I love about you people.
The people living in Detroit have no clue until I do a chart.
No, it's America.
We lost Detroit.
We're fighting for the soul of America, Rush.
Well, where did you move from?
Boston.
Okay, now obviously you're married.
Yes, I'm married.
I married a man from here.
Oh, okay.
So that's.
But we have.
Yes, I came out here for a job in advertising, actually.
Your husband did, or you did?
I did.
Can your husband read?
Yes, he went to Princeton.
Well, now.
You know, then there's the next.
You know, look.
I'm sorry.
I've got to talk to Mike Fezzi, who's the general manager at WGI.
I love Mike.
Mike, I got to ask this question.
I'm sorry.
Please don't hold against me.
He's in Princeton and Boston.
Yes?
I can't ask the question.
Oh, ask it.
I won't be embarrassed.
How did you end up?
How did I end up where?
In Michigan?
In Michigan, yeah.
Oh, I came out for a job to work in Toronto.
I came out for a job, and I fell in love with you.
No, your husband went out there.
Oh, he's from here.
I know.
So that's why you went back?
No, no, no, no.
I got married here.
I came out single.
Oh, this is worse than I thought.
I know.
It's terrible.
It's a terrible story.
Actually, folks, let me tell you something.
I want to use this as another teachable moment.
Because, Janet, I love you.
This is the great opportunity here.
For those of you who don't know, Gross Point is a wealthy suburb of Detroit.
Was.
All right, but it's in better shape than our housing values are at $19.96 rate.
I'm getting no help here.
It's still, it's still a beautiful place to live.
It is.
It's incredible.
All right.
Now, most people think that people like you who live in a really, really nice place, like you couldn't care less what's happening to Detroit.
But listen, you do.
You don't live in Detroit.
You live in Gross Point.
I know.
But you care deeply about what's happening in Detroit.
I got my dog out of a dumpster a year ago today, a black pit bull puppy named the Reverend Sharpton.
You grabbed a dog out of a dumpster?
In Detroit.
Okay.
And you named it Reverend Sharpton?
After you.
And it's a pit bull?
You know what?
I want you to call your vet and say, hey, I need to bring Reverend Sharpton by getting neutered.
I got to run, Janet.
Thanks much.
It's great to have you on the program.
Standby, audio sound by number 26.
I'm going to try to squeeze it in.
I may not get it in here to Obama, but I couldn't believe these numbers that she passed out in Detroit on literacy.
So I went to a quick check, the Detroit Literacy Coalition.
Now, the functional illiteracy rate in Michigan, according to the mission statement of the Detroit, frequently asked questions from the Detroit Literacy Coalition website, the functional illiteracy rate in Michigan is 18%.
The functional illiteracy rate in Detroit is 47%.
So she was close.
What'd she say?
49?
I just found that unbelievable.
It's 47% functional illiteracy in Detroit.
Now, I didn't understand her stat on graduations because she got me confused on kindergarten there.
But the Detroit Literacy Coalition says that the high school graduation rate in Detroit, no accurate data reported, but it hovers about 65 to 70 percent.
Now, she used a figure of 21 percent at kindergarten and so forth.
But I mean, some of those people probably leave town before they get to high school.
They're lucky.
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