You know this big effort to reduce home foreclosures?
Loan modifications are on the rise, but many people are not seeing smaller payments.
26% of people who are supposed to be helped are back in default.
25% have ended up paying more on their mortgage under the restructuring of this science.
And this is Obama, baby.
It ain't Bush live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Okay, folks, one big hour to go on Open Line Friday, 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
The email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
Oh, a programming note.
I will not be here on Monday.
We have Mark Stein.
Did you say you got Mark Stein as a guest host coming in on Monday?
Just so you know, everything's cool, something I have to do.
But Mark Stein, who everybody loves, will be here guest hosting the program on Monday.
And finally, it happens sooner than I thought.
My Carbonite backup is finished.
Carbonite's now available for Macintosh.
Oh, I should point out, by the way, the Mac version for Carbonite's only available for Intel Macs.
If you have a PowerPC Macintosh with an IBM chip, a PowerPC chip, G4, G5, Carbonite will not work.
You need an Intel chip.
Why are you smirking?
Why are you smirking?
You still have the other ones?
Well, there's some people that do.
I mean, some people still have the G4, the G5s.
They're going to have to, you know, the new system is going to be 64-bit.
They just activated the kernel, by the way, in the latest beta they sent out.
Apple did.
And once that happens, the PC chip's soon not going to work.
You're going to have to go Intel at some point.
It is imminent.
Anyway, I just finished my off-site online Carbonite backup.
It took two weeks to do about 300 gigabytes.
Now, that's just half the hard drive.
It doesn't back up applications.
And there's another thing it doesn't back up, but it backs up the important things in your user file.
But it's really insurance.
I got the funniest note from somebody the other day.
Some guy had gone out and he had signed up.
He got Carbonite.
And once it starts backing up, I mean, you basically, everybody wants their initial backup to finish and you watch it every day to see how it's doing.
It goes slow.
It is.
It's a factor of upload speeds, not carbonite.
It's your connection.
And upload speeds are not nearly as quick as fast as download speeds are.
But once it's done, you forget about it because it backs up.
It'll only back up what's changed.
And it backs up every time you're on the internet in the background.
You don't even see it.
There's one guy forgot he had carbonite.
He sends me a note.
He lost his hard drive and he panicked.
He didn't know what to do.
Oh my gosh, I've lost everything.
His wife had to remind him.
No, you've got carbonite.
Everybody loses data on their hard drive at some point, or most people do.
And it's traumatic because as you learn to use your computer, you put more and more important things on it.
So it really is.
Well, experienced people do too.
It happens because it's largely it's nothing you do.
It could have been a power surge.
You know, you can, you can, if you're trying to move data from an old hard drive to a new, you can lose.
I mean, you cannot go wrong by having it backed up is the point.
And Carbonite's a great way to do it.
Carbonite.com, offer code Rush, and they get the first 15 days free.
And it's where mine just finished.
Now I'm watching the incrementals, you know, just back up only.
And now I'm going to start adding things.
Just have the user folder back up first.
Now, I'm going to start adding things to it.
Here are the details, ladies and gentlemen, on the loan modification story.
Again, it's from the Associated Press.
U.S. lenders are boosting their attempts to avoid home foreclosures, but fewer than half, less than 50% of loan modifications made at the end of last year actually reduced borrowers' payments by more than 10%.
This is according to data released today.
The report based on an analysis of nearly 35 million loans was published by the federal office of the controller of the currency and the officer of thrift supervision.
And it provides the most detailed and broad analysis to date of efforts to stem the foreclosure crisis.
Among loan modifications made in the October, December quarter, about 37% resulted in a drop of payments about more than 10%, compared with about one-fourth in the first nine months of the year.
The trend toward lowering payments to make home mortgages more affordable is moving in the right direction, but nearly one in four loan modifications in the fourth quarter actually resulted in increased payments, increased higher monthly payments.
That situation can happen when lenders add fees or pass due interest to a loan and spread those payments out over the 30 or 40 year period.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report found that loans were far less likely to fall back into default if a borrower's monthly payment is reduced.
Nine months after modification, about 26% of loans in which payments had dropped by 10% or more had fallen back into default, contradicting the whole theory.
Reduce the payment, reduced default.
The people whose payments went down more than 10%, 26% of them went into default.
I can't help but laugh at this.
Well, why, Rush?
Where are you?
Because the government was going to fix it, right?
The government was going to make sure you could afford your house, right?
The government was going to make sure that those evil bankers had to make sure that you were going to get a lower mortgage payment.
And it isn't working.
And I don't want to sit here and go, nin, yin, yin, yin, yin, but it's hard not to.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's the government, after all.
It's a bureaucracy ordering banks to do things that the banks otherwise wouldn't do.
And of course, the banks, these evil guys, are trying to find a way to recuperate what they're being forced to lose by spreading out some payments over the 30 or 40 year life of your mortgage.
Plus, I mean, the dirty little secret is, this is a cruel thing to say.
Cruel thing to say.
But these are the beneficiaries of Barney Frank's definition of affordable housing.
Give you a house.
These are people who couldn't qualify for the loan in the first place and weren't asked to.
These are the people who had to show no history whatsoever in order to get a loan.
Clinton, Acorn, Community Redevelopment Act, Obama forced the banks to make these loans.
These people can't pay them.
They're losers in the first place.
And even after old buddy federal government steps in and try to help them out, they're still losers.
It's not turning them into winners.
I wonder how many of them have tattoos.
Well, I asked that question because of this next story.
I don't know where this story is from, but it looks official.
I know who wrote it, but when it was printed out, it didn't give me the website, and I have forgotten.
But the headline says it all.
Having tattoos is a sign of low self-esteem.
Covering your body in tattoos is a sign of low self-esteem, according to a new study.
The psychologists who studied this warned that people considering a tattoo should think extremely carefully before submitting themselves to the needle in the ink.
Because the study found that people who had three or more tattoos were likely to have low self-esteem.
They found four reasons why people get tattoos.
To be rebellious, to belong to a group, for aesthetic reasons, and because of a strong emotional attachment.
To what, I mean, it could be anything, I guess, another person, the needle, ink.
Who knows?
Now, this is a story in the Washington Post today.
Too many cars and they're not on the road.
I just, folks, I just love this.
The sea of new cars, 57,000 of them, stretches for acres along the port of Baltimore.
They are imports just in from foreign shores and exports waiting to ship out.
Chryslers and Subaroos, Fords and Hyundai's.
Is it Hyundai or Hyundai?
Hyundai's.
Mercedes, Kia's.
But the customers who once bought them by the millions have largely vanished.
No, that's not the way to put it.
It's the money that people used to have to buy them that has vanished.
It is the job that people used to have to provide the money to buy the cars that has vanished.
The people are still there.
And the people who have jobs for crying out loud, if you're feeling guilty that you've got a job, you're sure as hell going to feel guilty about buying a new car.
Are you not?
And so the cars continue to pile up.
So many that some are now stored at the nearby Baltimore, Washington International Marshall Airport.
The backlog exists because of many of the factors that contributed to the collapse of the housing bubble.
Cheap credit, easy financing, excessive production, consumers buying more than they could afford, undermined another large and vital American industry.
Oh, because it's American people's fault.
I see.
It's the American people's fault.
Cheap credit, easy financing, excessive production, consumers buying more than they could afford.
All of this undermined another large and vital American industry.
There was a car bubble, said Stephen Ratner.
I get this.
A car bubble, like the housing bubble, like the dot-com bubble.
There was a car bubble, said Steve Ratner, a best friend of Pinch Schulzberger, by the way.
And Steve Ratner, who President Obama recruited to head a Treasury Department group charged with finding solutions to the mountain of problems facing the American auto industry.
We had this artificially high sales rate.
Oh, so we had too many Americans buying too many cars.
Too many Americans.
That's the problem.
There was too much consuming going on out there.
Too much consuming led to too much production.
And then when the consuming stopped, the production piled up.
So, One of the key questions that the auto task force, not one member of which has the slightest idea about cars, must answer is figuring out a sustainable number of automobile sales.
Well, now this is even better because now the auto task force is going to sit there and try to come up with the number of cars that ought to be produced.
And I presume dictate this to the manufacturers.
One thing you could do, just spend a year taking actual orders with down payments, but I get the unions won't go for that.
Nobody puts the unions in these equations.
How can you talk about overproduction of cars and not mention that you've got to keep the union working?
Now I digress.
What we have here is a Washington Post story about literally thousands of unsold cars piling up in the porch, no place for the cars to go.
All this at the same time the U.S. government's deciding to take over the automobile business.
All the while, the same government's doing all it can to figure out how to tax people out of their cars.
Produce cars that they don't want.
The ultimate goal of forcing us into government-controlled public transportation, which would only make sense to a liberal.
But now we got a crisis.
We got a car crisis, and the car crisis is not just what's going on in the car.
It's all this glut of cars.
And of course, it's the American people's fault because they artificially bought too many for so many years, and now they're not buying enough.
And so there's an overproduction.
It's causing stress at our points.
It's just so sad.
All right, we've got to take a brief time out.
A lot of audio soundbites I want to get to today in the remaining hour and your phone calls on Open Line Friday.
Be right back.
Sit tight.
You know, folks, I am convinced.
I think Geraldo Rivera is the grim reaper.
Every time I see it, what are you covering your eyes for, Dawn?
Every time I see Geraldo Rivera on Fox, somebody has died.
That's when they bring him out.
And we have 12 dead in Binghamton, New York in that immigration center shooting.
All right.
Open Line Friday to Cartersville, Georgia.
Sorry, this is Irving.
And I'm glad you waited.
Irving, welcome to the EIB network.
Oh, my goodness.
I can't believe it.
20-year EIB alumnus, proud Reagan, revolutionary diddles to you, sir.
Thank you, El Mucho, Irving.
Well, Rush, I don't know why I don't hear any anger.
I don't know why no one is angry today.
I'm very, very upset at what's going on.
All of these things that are going on, and I don't know what to do.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I know we voted, and that's in the past, and that's fine.
But as you say, four years of this, I don't see much anger.
I don't even see it with the Republicans.
The closest one that I see that's angry is this fellow named Daniel Hannan.
He's the closest that I see to any righteous indignation.
Now, wait a second.
Irving, hang on a second out there.
There's a lot of people that are angry, and they're organizing things called tea parties.
And there are going to be a slew of them on April 15th.
They're going to be huge.
They're getting so big that some local communities are looking for ways to shut them down on pretext that they can't guarantee security.
There's going to be a big one in Kansas City, a big one in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis.
They're going to be big in Atlanta.
I can't tell you how.
There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe more people that are angry.
It's just the drive-by media does a report on it.
And the Republicans are not angry.
They're not professing any anger.
They're just opposing all this, but they can't stop it.
They don't have enough votes.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned about the tea parties because I remember, and I'm a student of the Tea Parties, and I'll tell you, I know what they did in those Tea Parties, and I understand we're at a different era, but the Tea Parties were throwing things overboard, dressing up, you know, eventually the Tarnfeather stuff.
I mean, I'm talking about real core.
I hope that what you're saying is correct because something needs to be done, Rush, and I hope the Tea Parties are the start of it.
I think they are.
I think there's a lot of anger and fear that is bubbling up out there, effervescing underneath the surface.
It's just that right now, the media is in a total slavish mode when it comes to Obama and doing everything possible to make him look good and to make it look as though none of what's happening in the country today has anything to do with him.
And that's what's got you depressed.
What's got you depressed is you watch the media and you think everybody laps it up, and a lot of people do.
A lot of people do.
It may not be four years, but it's going to be a long time.
I mean, the next opportunity to change any of this is not until 2010.
And you can sit around and you can hope for some big blowback.
And you can hope for some tipping point to be reached where magically people stand up.
But I don't buy this waiting around and hoping for things to happen.
Things generally have to be made to happen.
And I just remind you: although this is much worse, think back to the eight years of Clinton.
How many times have we said something's going to happen?
Something's going to happen to wake the American people up.
Something's going to happen.
And not even Monica Lewinsky woke him up.
Not even Lying Under Oaf woke him up.
So it's a mistake to sit around that this is why each and every day, there's two ways of going at Obama, I think.
Or there's a choice of two ways.
I think it's a mistake to just pound policy.
People aren't going to listen to it.
They don't blame him for that.
They think everything Obama's doing is done to fix what's already wrong when he got there.
It's a waste of time.
It's educational and it's informative.
Don't misunderstand.
It's got to be done.
But the thing that irritates this White House the most and the way to really put them off stride is to laugh at them, to ridicule them, and to make fun of them.
You know, to go just hands-wringing and get people serious dissertations on the problems of Obama policy.
Yeah, I mean, that has to be done.
But at the same time, laughter, making fun of them, ridicule them.
That's what they don't like.
He's supreme leader.
You don't do that.
That's what will take them off stride.
It's Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh.
As usual, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair to Stanton, Michigan, or what's left of it anyway.
This is Dawn.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hello, Rush.
I would like to address the lady who wanted to know what smart is.
I consider myself very intelligent.
I'm not very smart.
The person who walks off the curb into the line of traffic and has to run back to the curb to be safe is smart.
The person who looks both ways first before crossing the street is intelligent.
I pray that your intelligence ceases through this mess that all of our men fought for in World War II.
Now, no way that you're really taking this seriously, and I find this fascinating.
William F. Buckley wrote a piece for Playboy back in the 80s, and it was entitled Redefining Smart, and it was his premise was, he calculated,
At what point during the course of human civilization was it possible to know everything man knew, and at what point was it simply impossible to keep up with all of the new knowledge that was charted and published?
At what point did it become impossible for somebody to know everything that was known?
Well, that happened long many, many centuries ago.
It is impossible to know everything.
So the question, who's smart?
So would you go through that again, because you said somebody that dashes into traffic, sees a car coming and comes back, is smart right, but the person who stands on the curb and looks both ways to see what traffic is moving is intelligent.
That doesn't mean stand there for an hour.
No, I understand.
But what's smart about dashing into traffic?
Oh, you mean without looking?
Yeah exactly oh, i'm sorry.
Well, what?
That's not.
Even that's dumb.
Of course it is smart.
People are pretty dumb.
I see what you're saying.
I hope so, right.
Well see, I think groupthink is the absolute antithesis to smart and intelligence, and that's what Ivy Leaguers come out with.
They are groupthinkers.
Liberals are groupthinkers.
They cannot think in the same way.
They have the same worldview.
It's astounding how identical they all are.
isn't it astounding how identical all liberals are in what they think what they say and how they say it and how they arrive at what they believe and how they refute what they don't believe it's identical no matter who it is it could be obama it could be bill ayers could be jeremiah wright it could be some toad on a blog they are identical in what they believe because they feel it they're identical in how they say it
Exactly, and this is what?
Well, but they're not all college graduates.
But it is what college is for, it's to conform, it's to take all these budding young individualists and and and bend them and shape them and flake them and form them.
Here let me play a couple sound bites for you.
This is fascinating.
Last night on Larry King, Live Pennillet, who's a renowned magician and he's also a libertarian.
He was on with um, uh see, Sis.
Uh, who's the other, Terry Holt, who I guess is a Terry Holt?
Uh well, the Terry Holt I know is a Republican consultant, or was, I think, and the um intriguing uh, struggling very hard mightily, against formidable odds, Stephanie Miller, who is said to be a liberal radio talk show host.
But one must have an audience and it's uh, it's, debatable.
Some instant message last night and somebody sent me a note incredulous that Msnbc had hired another full-fledged liberal.
And the note said, you know, they're going to have trouble with if, if this administration steps in it, if there's a Lewinski type thing, their audience is going to vanish there because they're going to, they're not going to be able to defend it.
And I said their audience is so small at Msnbc that if they lost it all it wouldn't make that big a difference.
So anyway, these are the guests.
Stephanie Miller, who always has the kindest and most insightful, warm things to say about me.
Larry King Ditto and Penn Jillette.
Now, this is a couple soundbites here about individualism, interestingly enough.
Larry King, every one of his guests who he thinks is not liberal, he asked, Penn, you want Obama to succeed?
Well, the nice thing about hoping is that it doesn't work so that you don't have to worry very much what you're hoping.
If what succeeding means is taking away, giving too much of a safety net so we can't live like Vegas.
There's no reason to gamble if you can't lose.
And I think it's really important that people have a chance to win and to fail.
And I think too much of a safety net, it's just less fun to live.
And he's exactly right.
Obama is trying to tell people he's going to have a warranty for them, a lifetime warranty against failure.
It's like promising you're going to go to Vegas and you won't lose.
Nobody else is going to win either.
Your feelings won't be hurt because nobody else is going to win, but you aren't going to lose.
And Penn Jillette's saying, can't do that.
Can't do that.
So this brought the following question from Larry King.
Stephanie, do you want him to succeed no matter what the success brings?
Rush Limbaugh said, if Obama fails, America wins.
How does that make sense to any rational person?
It all depends on what you want.
If his programs brought about health insurance that pleased all, taxes that pleased most, a better way of life for a lot of people, then that's the kind of success you would think you'd like.
If you please everybody on anything, you're doing something wrong.
But luckily, there's no chance of that.
I just think that individuals are more important than a whole kind of group think, and that individuals can do more than a top-down kind of thinking.
I don't think the government can solve all our problems or should try.
And you have 300 million people.
You can be individualists as much as you like.
Somebody's got to think for the masses.
Somebody's got to think for the masses.
Larry King.
Stephanie, what is so difficult to understand?
It's entirely rational.
If Obama fails, America wins.
These people are unwilling to even...
Okay, what did Limbos...
Oh, Limbaugh said it.
It's got to be extremely outrageous and obscene.
Forget it.
Limbaugh is a slut.
Limbaugh is whatever.
Why don't you stop and think about it for just a second instead of having a knee-jerk reaction?
What does it actually mean for Obama if Obama is going to run the automobile?
It's ridiculous to have to waste time running through this.
If Obama is going to sincerely dent the engine of productivity that made this country great, what in the world is successful about this?
Oh, somebody's going to think for the masses.
You have 300 million people to be individual all you want.
No, we can't, Larry.
That's the whole point.
We can't be individual all we want.
For crying out loud, Larry, we got people feeling guilty that they have jobs for crying out.
Who the hell do you think is enforcing that kind of thing?
Guilty that we have a job?
I can't talk about it.
It might hurt your business.
So anyway, Penn Jillette had a lone voice of reason on Larry King along.
Well, 300 million people, we need somebody to think for the masses.
Amen.
There you have it.
Need somebody to think for you, you idiots.
You dumb rear ends.
You are too stupid to think for yourselves.
You are too dense to come up with the right answers.
We have to think for the masses.
I want to know at what point in American history that happened.
When did that start, Lair?
You take me from the Constitution for a when did somebody think for the masses?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You might be able to say FDR did.
Boy, those are miserable times for people that were alive.
Now, we don't want to say that, of course, because that's not politically correct.
By the way, Dawn was calling from what I do now.
What I do now.
What did I do?
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
When she gets looks on her face, they say, oh, no, what did I do now?
It wasn't me.
Snertly said something in there.
Dawn, the previous caller was calling from Michigan, right?
Stanton, Michigan.
And she didn't catch that.
I said, but what's left of Stanton, Michigan?
A reason for that.
This is from the Detroit News.
Headline says it all.
Leaving Michigan behind.
Eight-year population exodus staggers state.
Outflow of skilled, educated workers crimps Michigan's recovery.
The state loses a family every 12 minutes.
And the families who are leaving, young, well-educated, high-income earners are the people the state desperately needs to reveal.
Why are they leaving?
Why are they leaving?
Certainly, why are they leaving?
Jennifer Grandholm, in the last two to three decades, could somebody name for me what party governed Michigan for the vast majority of the past 20, 30 years?
What party governed Detroit for as long back as anybody can remember?
Democrats.
Now, what teachable moment here?
And in this whole story, there's not one mention of high taxes.
And now the government taking over General Motors.
So more Democrats running that industry.
All right, I got a quick timeout.
Big break back after this.
Don't go away.
I love this song, Spencer Davis Group.
It is from 1965.
I know John Engler was governor of Michigan for 12 years in there.
In fact, I'll never forget I was, I think I was in Detroit at our affiliate there when Engler, when Engler, when I remember the morning guy, said, Who the hell is this?
He was a shock when Engler won the governorship in Michigan.
He did cut some taxes.
He raised them at the end of the game thrown out.
But we did have a Republican governor in Michigan for 12 years.
I have, you know, folks, I normally don't do this.
Those of you who listen regularly to this program know this, but I'm going to make a brief departure.
I'm going to address again both Stephanie Miller and Larry King.
Normally, people talk about me, I just leave them alone because everybody does.
And if all I did was respond to people to talk about me, that's all we would do here.
And we still couldn't squeeze it all in at three hours.
But Stephanie Miller on Larry King Alive last night said, Rush Limbaugh said if Obama fails, America wins.
How does that make any sense to any rational person, you know?
Stephanie, let me explain it so that you might understand it.
Remember all those times, Stephanie, that you said that you wanted Bush to succeed?
You remember, Stephanie, all those times you said you want Bush to get his tax cuts passed and you wanted his tax cuts to succeed?
Do you remember, Stephanie, all of his Supreme Court nominations?
You remember how you advocated for his Supreme Court nominations to succeed, Stephanie?
Do you remember, Stephanie?
remember you were one of the most prominent supporters of the war in Iraq.
You were hoping President Bush succeeded.
You wanted President Bush's war in Iraq to succeed.
I remember that, Stephanie.
Didn't you say all of this, Stephanie?
I mean, is it's axiomatic?
Presidents, whatever they do, must succeed.
It's irrational.
That's what we say about kings, Stephanie.
We want kings to succeed.
We want our slave masters to succeed.
We want, but we're a representative republic and we have separation of powers.
What sane pertinent person wouldn't want Bush to succeed, Stephanie?
What sane person wouldn't have?
And Larry, for you.
Now, for somebody thinking for the masses, I love this.
Larry, we are not masses.
We're individuals.
We live in a society governed under a constitution that protects the individual from the government.
Larry, you might want to educate yourself about your country and its history and educate yourself on freedom.
But you know what's the funniest thing about Larry King saying, somebody's got to think for the masses?
Larry King doesn't think he's the masses.
See, he's an elitist.
But the masses are you faceless dorks who can't fend for yourself.
You need your healthcare.
Hey, you need people paying your mortgage.
You need, hold on.
But Larry King, well, he's not the masses.
Larry, let me give you a clue.
To Barack Obama, you are no different than anybody else in the masses.
You are to be controlled.
You are to be made subject to the whims of government and the administration.
This is what I find most hilarious about this.
All these elitists think, somebody's going to think for the masses.
Larry, you are the masses.
With this bunch of people in, you think you're exempted because you're one of them.
You think you're exempted because you're a good liberal.
You're in the media.
You work at CNN.
You are the masses.
You just don't think so.
You don't sound any different than any other liberal anywhere.
There's nothing to differentiate you from any other liberal or and there's and you're not alone.
You are the masses.
You're a robot.
So the Japanese are going to put some robots up on the moon.
So Obama's got 300 million robots in America.
Who needs them on the moon?
By the way, before I go, folks, I have to remind you, the G20.
There's all kinds of BS about the G20 in the drive-by media.
The Heritage Foundation has the truth.
The more I go there, the more I find things you will not find anywhere else.
AskHeritage.org.
Yes, you join.
I'm a member.
25 bucks.
And then AskHeritage.org.
It's amazing what's there, and it's just a website away.
AskHeritage.org.
And then check out the G20 section if you want to find out what really happened and what really happened to our sovereignty, how this country was carved up.
Heritage Foundation has it.
Brief time out.
Back to close it out here in just a second.
Something else that Barack Obama said today over in Strasbourg, France.
He said, even though I'm now president, George Bush is no longer president, al-Qaeda is still a threat.
And we can't pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected president, suddenly everything is going to be okay.
It is true that we have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect and changing our language and changing our tone.
We have to change our behavior to show them more respect.