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Feb. 20, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:50
February 20, 2009, Friday, Hour #2
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Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
I am Rush Limbaugh, America's real anchor man.
Also serving as America's truth detector.
America's Doctor of Democracy.
And seemingly the last man standing.
The man President Obama wants no one listening to.
It's Friday.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
And we're going to get to your phone calls El Quickle in this hour.
800-28282.
If you want to appear on the phone, the email address L Rushball at EIB net.com.
I want to ask those of you in this audience, those of you liberals, and especially those of you in this audience who are moderates, who voted for President Obama on the basis that you thought we're getting somebody truly different.
Magnanimous.
We were going to get a new president that was going to wipe away all of the old arguments and uh trivialize all of the old disagreements, and we're going to truly become a country on the upward move to lofty new heights unbefore realized.
That's really what you believed.
That you thought that's what you were voting for.
I want you ask yourselves honestly, because I'm asking you to do so.
Do you think that's what you've gotten here?
We have a stock market down over 2,000 points the election of Obama.
The stock market has plunged more since Obama was elected than it did during the Bush period of September and October.
We are bailing out losers with money that we are printing.
We are punishing achievers, but more importantly, the first people to raise the specter of race since the immaculation have been Obama people.
James Cleburn from South Carolina, Chairman Congressional Black Caucus, and Eric Holder.
What of all this new magnanimity that we were going to have?
What about all this new love and unification, all these things that you genuinely believed would happen if we would just cross this barrier and finally admit once and for all our sins and elect this articulate, clean black gentleman who speaks so well as Joe Biden pointed out.
How do you feel about all this now?
I'll tell you what I'm sensing out there.
Not just among people on our side, and I'm speaking to the conservatives of you in the audience.
I'm sensing the effervescence, the pulse of a backlash of a revolution.
The people, the mob, the great unwashed, the people who make the country work, whatever you wish to call them.
They're going to turn.
And after they've made the slow turn, it's going to be like the tide coming in.
It's unstoppable.
I'm talking about those of you who both pay your mortgages and pay your taxes.
The vast majority of the workforce, the kind of people who voted for and loved Ronald Reagan, the kind of people who voted for Obama thinking lofty new heights were just ahead, that a new era of love and unification all over the world was ours, if this man simply became president.
These people are starting to realize that while they're working hard, and while they're playing by the rules, there were a lot of idiots spending more than they had and getting in way over their heads, and now those idiots are having to be bailed out by the people playing by the rules.
I am hearing it all over the place.
Despite all of this PCBS that the left has tried to shove down people's throats.
Most people in most parts of the country understand the traditional value of hard work and living within their means.
And now they're starting to ask, why in the hell should I pay for somebody else's bad decisions?
Why should I reward their bad behavior?
It was proclaimed loudly on the Chicago Board of Trade yesterday by CNBC's Rick Santelli, the Chicago Tea Party.
There is an extension here of what the left has been doing with youth sports for the past 20 years.
We, on this program, every time we've seen an example of this, we've chronicled it for you.
One team in a youth sports league is better than all the others, so they stop keeping score.
Because we don't want to humiliate the losers.
We don't want to make them feel bad.
We don't want to hurt their feelings.
Well, contrary to what the PC bosses might understand, these kids still keep score even if nobody hears about it.
But they're keeping score, and you know why?
Because kids, the United States is made up of competitive people.
You can have all a politically correct tree hugging lefty liberals tell them not to keep score, and they will keep score in their heads.
It's what drives them.
It's what drives all of us.
We are all competitive, and it is in our genes to want to improve our lives for our families.
It is called working in our own self-interests.
And I'll guarantee you, these kids in these youth leagues who are told not to keep score, when they get in their parents' cars at the end of the game, they can tell the parents exactly what score was.
They keep score.
Well, the same thing is happening with their parents.
Their parents are keeping score.
They may be afraid to say so publicly because they're not, they don't want to be called cowards by Eric Holder.
But here's the translation.
No matter how many times the Obama administration tells us that we have to step in and rescue the losers so they're not humiliated.
The ones who either bought too much house or didn't read the fine print on their loan, that we have to step in and bail these people out.
The rest of us are growing increasingly suspect.
We're starting to talk to each other.
Snerdley told me he walked out of his house the other day.
His neighbor came out just to tell him how mad he was about all this that's going on.
People are starting to talk to each other about this, and we are keeping score.
Biden may say that this is a recovery based on fairness.
In fact, grab that soundbite.
I think that's soundbite number three, is it not?
Yes, it is.
Joe Biden, this morning in the White House, introducing Obama who was about to address the U.S. Conference of Mayors in the East Room.
President Obama has put our nation on a path toward greater recovery.
Not only greater recovery, but greater decency, greater fairness, greater opportunity, along with economic recovery.
What's last in his list?
Economic recovery, what's first?
Decency.
Greater fairness.
Fairness defined by liberals as spreading misery equally.
That's what this bunch is about.
Fairness.
That's why they're content to let the market plunge, because only the rich are in the market, they think.
And it's about time the rich found out what it's like.
I guarantee you there is rage and anger in this administration that is behind some of the lack of attention.
There's not even a slightest bit concerned of what's happening in the market.
You can't find this administration expressing any concern over the investor class and what's happened to them.
Not one, not a syllable.
You can't find one stated concern.
All you'll find is statements about how we're going to control these people.
After we bail them out or nationalize them or what have you.
But people are keeping score.
This is what Obama doesn't know.
Barack Obama and his administration cannot kill the American spirit.
The stimulus package cannot kill the American spirit.
We are keeping score.
We have compassion for those who are truly blindsided by this.
But we don't want to bail out loser after loser after loser who decided to play fast and loose while we played it straight.
And make no mistake, that's how people look at this.
A lot of people, a vast majority of people in this country, think they've played it straight.
Now they're being told they have to make good for those who didn't.
It's no different than what the left has done in schools.
Outcome-based education.
We can't put people in advanced placement classes, and we humiliate those who were not suitable for admission.
The majority of the American people at the end of the day are competitive.
This is why we are a nation, for example, obsessed with our sports teams.
I'm a Steelers fan.
You think I don't care who wins when they play?
Hell.
Sometimes I'll even take a call from a referee wrong.
It goes in my favor.
I don't want to charge out there and say, hey ref, you blew it.
Give the other team the ball.
They deserve it.
I'll take it.
Well, the referees are giving everything to the losers.
Under the premise that they're only losers because the winners are winners.
Tax paying people who make it all work will not put up long rewarding failure, being forced to reward failure.
Beware this huge backlash.
It'll turn, it'll turn slowly, and like the tide coming in, it is unstoppable.
It has already started, in fact.
The pulse of the backlash has begun.
The pulse of revolution is out there.
And at some point, the anger that you know is there will surface and you will see it and you will hear it.
People will overcome their fear of opposition to this.
Because at the end of the day, they will not sit there and w and and and let everything they've worked for be destroyed.
Particularly on the basis that they deserve to be destroyed because it's been unfair in the first place, they succeeded.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
New York State seriously considering charging $10 for every resident to file their income tax if they do so with paper.
If you file electronically, no $10 fee.
If you file with paper, 10 bucks.
And for those of you, the hundreds of thousands of you losing your jobs.
You're probably going to have to start paying a fee to the bank to get your unemployment benefits.
You're going to be paying bank fees just to get access to your unemployment fees.
Remember how angry people got?
And I I I sort I didn't understand it when it first happened.
But people were livid over ATM fees.
They go to the ATM, maybe an ATM that was not directly part of their bank, but one that accepted their ATM card, and there was a fee to use it.
People were livid over this because they hated the banks in the first place.
For those of you that hate the banks, this ought to be a pretty happy day for you.
Because bank stocks are plunging, and the Obama administration is sitting around, no doubt, in the White House, smiling about it.
Wells Fargo is down 20%.
Citibank is now down 33%.
Bank of America down 22 and a half percent.
Let me check something very quickly.
Come on, update.
You know, some of these widgets, all this widgets are this and that.
Come on, update.
All right, here we go.
Citibank at a buck eighty-nine.
Citigroup at a buck eighty-nine down thirty-three percent.
You hate the banks, you ought to be happy.
If your money is in these banks, you ought to be really happy.
You heard the Obama administration talk about any of this.
I mean, Geithner hadn't said a word since two weeks ago.
That's when all this started.
They don't care.
In fact, I think it was Axelrod who might have said on One of the Sunday shows.
We're not paying attention to market.
The market has no impact at all in the formulation of our policies.
Well, what's the market, folks?
The market's made up of people with skin in the game, a favored Obama phrase.
The market is made up of people with skin in the game, people who invest in the economy.
They're not investing in the economy.
They're pulling out down 180 right now, the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
They're pulling out.
Oh, 195, down 195.
This is a six six-year low.
This is this is ever since Obama was elected and then immaculated.
They don't care.
It's creating chaos.
They're letting this crash happen.
You want to ask yourself why?
Answer it yourself.
Don't don't depend on me for everything.
Answer the question yourself.
Why are they now down 200?
At 7265.
Where was it?
13,000 in August.
We're going to have all this new magnanity, magnanimity, we're going to get all this new love and unity and get rid of all the garbage in the past that divided us.
Prosperity.
Sea levels were going to decline four percent.
Four feet.
Sea level's going to decline four feet.
All right, I'm tired of carrying a load on this show, so let's go to the phones.
Elijah, Georgia, Joe, welcome to the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Ah, Rush.
Uh really fired up a betcha article in the Wall Street Journal.
Terrific article, and I agree with Rick Santelli of CNBC.
We need a peaceful taxpayers revolt rush, and I am disgusted.
I've been a stockholder for 40 years.
I've one of those, I guess, so-called successful people, and by golly, we need to cut the capital gains.
You need to get the we need to get the president to start paying attention to the stock market in the Congress and rush.
The capital gains tax rate is now fifteen percent.
If they would cut that to ten percent, this stock market would take off like nothing you and I have ever seen, but we got to do it.
No, no, no, no.
I've I proposed that.
You know, I this is my second Wall Street Journal column in a month.
Right.
My first one was my bipartisan plan, and it was suspending capital gains.
Look, there aren't any capital gains.
I'm for that.
I'm for that.
There aren't any capital gains.
This is the point.
There are no capital gains.
We've got to suspend the capital gains tax to incentivize investment, then cut the corporate tax rate in half.
Uh but that's that's wholly totally rejected.
Well, we've got to get I I'll tell you the Republicans are their 25 million small businesses.
We got people like my friend Colonel Pooh, we're all fired up to do something about this, and the small businesses rush, they want less government, less taxes, and less regulation.
And if we can get these 25 million small businesses fired up, and we're trying to do that in LJ with my friend Colonel Pooh, we can change the face of this country.
Let me listen to you.
You and you and Colonel Poole.
Yes.
Whoever is Colonel Poole.
He's a great American.
I'm great, I'm sure he is.
Otherwise, he wouldn't be a colonel.
You know, becoming a colonel, it doesn't happen overnight.
Well, he's not a good one.
You gotta be you gotta be a colonel to be admitted into war colleges.
He's uh he's uh he owns the great barbecue restaurant, and he we're we're trying to fire up these 25 million businesses, and Russia for former Congressman Burns made our county the small business capital of the world, Gilmer County, home of Ella J. So we're fired up.
I know you what I was gonna say that you and Colonel Poole are a microcosm of what's starting to effervess all over this country.
You're not alone out there.
That is the point.
And of course, Santelli illustrated this.
The last place we ever expect folks, have you ever watched C NBC?
For the most part, CNBC's in a tank left, just like all the other drive-by media is.
Right.
They've got their exceptions.
They got Gasparino, they got Cudlaw, and they've got they've got uh Santelli.
But I mean, these people, they love it when the market's going down because to them it equals viewers.
It equals crisis, it equals people tuning in to find it.
Oh my god, how bad is it gonna be?
But we've got limbo and hannity.
That's great.
Yeah, I know, and and uh and you've got you've got an army of American citizens, too.
Twenty-five million small business, Russian, and and you're our leader, and we appreciate you, and we down here in LJ, Georgia, we're fired up and energized to get the capital gains cut, and we're gonna make it happen.
The stock market will go up.
I'm a I'm a long-term bull like you are.
There you go.
This is the kind of thinking that always made this country great.
He and Colonel Poole are not throwing in a towel.
He and Colonel Poole are not giving up.
He and Colonel Poole are thinking about 25 million small businesses causing a little revolution.
A little backlash.
God love Joe and Colonel Poole.
Colonel Poole owns a barbecue restaurant in Ill J, Georgia, trying to buy up a whole bunch more.
I'm look at that fits with the brilliance of my opening monologue.
That's who's out there.
He also want to thank you, Joe, for the uh nice words on my Wall Street Journal op-ed today.
I'll share with you excerpts of that before the program's over.
What I'll do it and I'll do it now.
I want to get some more phone calls in.
That's why we'll do that.
I'll get to it eventually.
Okay, I'm going to bow to pressure.
I'm going to bow to popular demand, and I'm going to share with you the op-ed today that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. President, keep the airwaves free.
It's an open letter to President Obama.
What are you mouthing at me?
What are you?
Well, it's it's tough to prove, Don, but it is strange.
I submit by request, by the way, the journal asked me for this.
So I uh okay, I'll I'll set something up and I'll get it to you on uh Wednesday night.
No, let's see.
No, it's Tuesday night.
I'll have it for you by Tuesday night.
And I sent it out three times on Tuesday.
I have on Wednesday morning, the guy I deal with with the journal who had asked me, since we know we still on, we really want to run this.
I said I sent it to you three times last night.
So sent it from a different email address.
He got it.
And he said, we're gonna run it Friday.
And I said, You look it, I don't want to say to do your business, it's your page and so forth, but you ought to run it Thursday, so it's gonna have some legs.
Well, we're not gonna have time to edit it and uh to get this gonna run Friday.
We got a lot of stuff planned for Thursday.
So okay.
So on Wednesday, Obama sends a spokesman out to say he doesn't believe in the fairness doctrine.
After all this is in the pipeline.
Well, we immediately began suspecting here.
Wait a second now.
This comes out of the blue.
How does this come out of the blue?
I mean, it could have been totally coincidental.
We cannot prove.
I have not investigated.
Whether there was a leak.
It's just very coincidental.
But I qu and when it happened, I I I sent my guy at the journal.
I said, Don't fall for this.
They're not going to call this the fairness doctrine.
Obama didn't deny he wants to censor radio.
He said he doesn't believe in the fairness doctrine.
So I altered one paragraph, fired it back, and it ran today.
They actually posted at 1115 last night.
Dear Mr. Presidents, an open letter to President Obama.
I have a straightforward question which I hope you will answer in a straightforward way.
Is it your intention to censor talk radio through a variety of contrivances, such as local content, diversity of ownership, and public interest rules, all of which are designed to appeal to populist sentiments, but as you know, are the death knell of talk radio and the AM band.
Mr. President, you have singled me out directly, admonishing members of Congress not to listen to my show.
Bill Clinton has chimed in since, complaining about the lack of balance on radio.
And a number of members of your party in and out of Congress are forming a chorus of advocates for government control over radio content.
This is both chilling and ominous.
As a former president of the Harvard Law Review and a constitutional professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
You, sir, are more familiar than most with the purpose of the Bill of Rights.
To protect the citizen from the possible excesses of the federal government.
The First Amendment says in part that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.
That government is explicitly prohibited, sir, from playing a role in refereeing among those who seek, speak or seek to speak.
We are, after all, dealing with political speech, which, as the Fravers understood, cannot be left to the government to police.
When I began my national talk show in 1988, no one, including radio industry professionals, thought my syndication would work.
There were only about 125 radio stations programming talk.
And there were numerous news articles and opinion pieces predicting the fast death of the AM band, which was hemorrhaging audience and revenue to the FM band.
Some people blamed the lower fidelity AM signals, but the big issue, sir, was broadcast content.
It is no accident that the AM band was dying under the so-called fairness doctrine, which choked robust debate about important issues because of its onerous attempts at rationing the content of speech.
After the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the fairness doctrine, started to do so in 1985, Congress passed legislation to reinstitute it, and when President Reagan vetoed it, he declared, quote, this doctrine requires federal officials to supervise the editorial practices of broadcasters in an effort to ensure that they provide coverage of controversial issues and a reasonable opportunity for the airing of contrasting viewpoints of those issues.
This type of content-based regulation by the federal government said Reagan is antagonistic to the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment.
History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.
Today, Mr. President, the number of radio stations is not 125.
The number of stations programming talk is well over 2,000.
The talk format is the largest format, the most popular format in radio today.
In fact, there are thousands of stations that air tens of thousands of programs covering virtually every conceivable topic and in various languages.
The explosion of talk radio has created legions of jobs and billions of dollars in economic value.
Not bad, sir, for an industry that only 20 years ago was moribund.
Content, content, content, Mr. President, is the reason for the huge turnaround of the past 20 years.
Not funding, not big money, as Mr. Clinton stated.
Not only has the AM band been revitalized, but there's competition from other venues, such as the internet and satellite broadcasting.
It is not an exaggeration to say that today more than ever, anyone with a microphone and a computer can broadcast his views, and thousands do.
Mr. President, we both know that this new effort at regulating speech is not about diversity.
It's about conformity.
It should be rejected.
You've said you're against reinstating the fairness doctrine, but you've not made it clear where you stand on possible regulatory efforts to impose so-called local content, diversity of ownership, and public interest rules that your FCC could issue.
If I may take a brief departure, the dirty little secret is Obama can say he opposes the fairness doctrine all day long.
If the FCC can get three votes to reinstitute it, it's done.
His signature is not needed.
So we'll see who he appoints to the FCC to head the thing up if he appoints somebody that's pro-fairness doctrine, I guarantee you.
What he says is irrelevant.
He doesn't need a signature for this.
And now back to the piece.
Mr. President, I do not favor content-based regulation of national public radio, newspapers, or broadcaster cable TV networks.
I would encourage you not to allow your office to be misused to advance a political vendetta against certain broadcasters whose opinions are not shared by many in your party and ideologically liberal groups like Acorn, the Center for American Progress and MoveOn.org, another departure, those groups are all spearheading efforts to reinstitute the fairness doctrine.
Mr. President, there is no groundswell of support behind this movement, indeed there's a groundswell against it.
The fact that the federal government issues broadcast licenses, the original purpose of which was to regulate radio signals ought not become an excuse to destroy one of the most accessible and popular marketplaces of expression.
The AM broadcast spectrum cannot Honestly be considered a scarce resource.
So as the temporary custodian of your office, you should agree that the Constitution is more important than scoring transient political victories, even when they are couched in the language of public interest.
So we in Talk Radio await your answer, sir.
What'll it be?
Government imposed censorship disguised as fairness and balance, or will the arena of ideas remain a free market?
Your servant.
I didn't put the snerdly's eyes when I did.
I did not close it out with yours.
Didn't close it out with anything other than Rush Limbaugh's a nationally syndicated host of great renown.
So that's that ran in the journal today.
And uh we'll see if the president sees fit or is asked rather to uh react to it.
Only time will tell.
Here's Todd in Cortland, Ohio.
Todd, glad you waited.
You're on open line Friday.
Hello.
Hey Rush, how are you?
Fine, sir.
I'll try to make this quick as I'm still on hold with Resco Mortgage Company, so if I hang up, I apologize.
That's the resco rescue from yesterday.
Yes, sir.
The rescue resco mortgage.
Good for you.
Hey, Rush, real quick, it seems like with this administration, if you need something, all you have to do is ask for it and you'll get it.
And I'm referring to the lady last week that asked for a house and got it.
Um do you think she did not get it from the administration?
She got it from the wife of a Democrat Congressman.
I don't even know she accepted it.
Look at it's not true, whatever you ask for from this administration you get.
Now don't say that.
There are certain people who might think that's going to happen to them.
Right.
But it isn't going to happen.
Okay, well, if enough people start complaining that they can't afford to go to a sporting event uh because it's too expensive, they can't take their family and their kids are crying and what have you.
Do you think the Obama administration will demand uh salary caps on pro athletes and take their bonuses?
No.
You don't.
No.
What about the Hollywood elite?
No.
Because I can't afford to take my family to the movies.
That's good.
They're not worth it.
That's true.
Okay, and one more comment.
Yes.
Okay, would it be fair to compare the administration to the mafia?
I grew up close to Youngstown, Ohio, where in the 70s where Mafia was ran rampant.
And it seems like pretty much the same.
They strong arm everybody.
And I think we should start giving the administration mafia names.
Um months ago, no, I wish I could remember th there's no difference between the mafia and politics.
Okay.
But I don't remember the tagline to it.
You know, like like the the politics of showbiz for the ugly, that's how they but this politics and mafia, the mob, there's no difference.
And I wish I could remember the tagline to it.
Bottom line is uh politicians always been a uh a shakedown game.
Uh most of the people, Todd, most of the big money people, not the average people who give their 25 bucks because they believe in ideas.
The big money people, most of them give money to Washington as a protection to make sure Washington doesn't come after them.
And of course, with this administration, those bets are off.
Doesn't matter how much you've given.
If you're big, they're coming after, and they're gonna sit back and laugh and smile while they watch your business plummet in value at the same time.
All right, back to the phones we go to Steve in Dry Ridge, Kentucky.
Great to have you on open line Friday, Steve.
Hello.
Rush, how are you doing?
Excellent to outstanding, sir.
It's uh first time caller, been listening since ninety-two.
Uh was a living up in Maine, Bangor, Maine.
And I think Stephen King bought the little uh small time uh radio station so he could get you off there.
Is that was that like ninety-four, ninety-three?
Anyway, my point, uh, can't even call him president, but Mr. Obama has no clue what it takes to be a manager leader.
Uh I was fortunate enough to serve in the military for ten years and served under some uh fine men and uh wait a minute.
Didn't you hear what Terry Moran said?
Oh, yeah, oh yeah.
Well, he stepped down, so he's got to get his sea legs.
He's coming down from a higher place.
So he being an executive is so beneath him that he's in over his eighty he's an overshead.
Well, you know, I I'm just uh an ordinary everyday guy, I live in and fly over country, but uh as a young man in nineteen seventy-two, I was fortunate enough to go into the army and uh managed to stand for ten years and worked under some guys that were leaders.
And one thing that leaders always do, and I know you know this, is they set the example.
And when Charlie Gibson does a little filler story at the end of his broadcast talking about how the uh thermostat is cranked up in the Oval Office, he just kind of laughs it off.
And uh, I'm wondering if somebody has told uh Mr. Obama that he's getting frequent flyer miles for flying Air Force One.
But uh I'll get off here and just wait and uh you know.
I I I we it's i w it's it's sort of uh coincidental that uh that you called thinking Obama's in over his head.
A lot of people think this I happen to not agree with the sediment.
However, a lot of people do, and so we put together a cute little parody based on this whole sediment.
That's white comedian Paul Shanklin, certainly no racial coward.
As President Obama, and I think I'm in over my head parodying the old great song from the grooveyard of forgotten favorites by Little Anthony and the Imperials.
I don't think he's in over his head.
He doesn't have executive ability, but he doesn't have to, he's delegating all this stuff and flying around the country, flying around the world.
Let Pelosi write the bill.
Then when it comes time to sign it, Pelosi's in Italy being admonished by the Pope on abortion while Obama gets to soak up all the credit for the thing.
Don't think he's in over his head.
He's getting what he wants.
He doesn't know, I think, of the backlash ahead.
Maybe he does, but he's getting what he wants here, folks.
How could he be over his head in the press?
Do you know what the White House reaction was yesterday to Rick Santelli's um suggestion of a Chicago Tea Party?
Well, Chuck Todd, who works at NBC, is a White House correspondent, says that the White House laughed about it.
They just they just laughed at Santelle.
They thought it was hilarious.
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