All Episodes
Previous Next
May 12, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:03
May 12, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, here's another outrage.
Obama's going to go ahead and release more interrogation photos to prove what a rotten, mean bunch of SOBs the U.S. military and the CIA is.
There's no law requiring him to do this.
It's not Obama has to.
It's not Obama must.
It's Obama wants to.
I guarantee you there is nothing good that can come from this.
And that's precisely why he's going to do it.
Greetings, Rushland Boy, the EIB Network.
Great to have you here, folks, as we have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address lrushbow at EIBNet.com.
So the Senate is debating, ladies and gentlemen, the credit card reform legislation.
I mean, they're going to get really tough with these credit card companies out there.
And they're going to stabilize interest rates.
They're going to stabilize this.
They're going to get rid of the fraud, get rid of the abuse on the part of the evil credit card companies.
And it'll happen nine months after it's signed.
Now, this, if it is signed, which it will be, of course, this is the same United States Senate that all during the 90s passed a whole bunch of bills designed to get those mean cable companies to treat you fairly and to lower your cable prices.
And I just want you to go back and I want you to remember from the 90s through today how your cable bills have gotten cheaper and how you're happier and how, boy, you're so glad the U.S. Senate fixed that problem.
Any of you had your cable bills getting cheaper other than by giving up service?
And then how many of you actually gave up service just to keep your bill the same?
It's not going to get cheaper.
It's all just PR gobbledygook.
And I really, you know, during the break, I went and did some research on sugar.
There are very few times, ladies and gentlemen, where I think and have thought in the 20 plus years I've hosted this program that I'm wasting my time.
But I'm on the brink of thinking, if I've got to explain sugar to people, I'm wasting my time.
And then I realized, no, you're not wasting your time.
And that's even more depressing.
I found a piece here by a blogger named Laurie Bibi at, I don't even know what the site is.
Health fitness.
It's ezinearticles.com.
E-zine articles.
At any rate, when did sugar start getting such a bad rap?
Unlike many herbs and supplements, which are touted for being safe and healthy because they're natural, people forget that sugar comes from the sugar cane plant or from sugar beets.
Sugar is as natural as your favorite herb.
In a survey where people were asked how many calories are in a teaspoon of sugar, the answers went as high as 200 calories or more.
Do you know how many calories are in a teaspoon of sugar?
16.
How the hell did you know this, thirdly?
You knew it.
Rachel knew it.
16 calories in a teaspoon of sugar.
So how did sugar get a reputation for being fattening, causing diabetes, contributing to the obesity epidemic?
Well, many people don't use sugar or many other foods, for that matter, in moderation.
In fact, a teaspoon of sugar on your morning cereal or grapefruit and another in your coffee and a third teaspoon in your iced tea will add up to less than 50 calories.
How can that be a hazard to your health?
Then people start thinking, well, donuts, don't start talking about the doughnuts.
Sugar in doughnuts is not what's fattening.
It's not where the calories come from.
It's the fat.
It's the grease.
Donuts are fried.
It's not the sugar.
But the idea that sugar leads to diabetes, if you eat too much sugar, you're going to get diabetes.
That is another one of these myths that diabetes results from a problem in the pancreas resulting from insulin.
And there are many different kinds of people hear the term blood sugar.
You know, they think, oh, that's a little dominoes granules floating around in my blood.
It's not that at all.
But you get these wacko leftists who just want to manage everybody's lives.
They're not content to manage their own.
They have to drum up things.
Somebody show me where do you go?
We just had a caller say that there's withdrawal symptoms from sugar.
When's the last person that went to a sugarholics anonymous meeting?
I want to know if it's that addictive.
It's just as addictive as cocaine.
Just as addictive and just as destructive, if she said more so than heroin, cocaine, or what have you.
And of course, it's just patently false.
My father had diabetes.
And it wasn't because he ate a lot of sugar.
He didn't have a sweet tooth at all.
I don't have a sweet tooth.
And my dad didn't.
I remember once when he was diagnosed with, I think it was type 1 when he was in his mid-50s.
And he was having to shoot up insulin.
His pancreas just wasn't making it.
It didn't matter what he ate.
Eat anything and your blood sugar is going to skyrocket.
Certain things you can't eat, so forth.
But a lot of things that get broken down as sugar, you can eat as a diabetic.
And everything does get broken down into one form of a sugar or another in the whole metabolic process.
But one of the problems he had was regulating his insulin.
If you inject too much insulin, you go into insulin shock.
Have you ever seen somebody in insulin shock?
Well, they start shaking and coughing, and you think they're going to die.
And you know what the cure for it is?
A glass of orange juice, which is loaded with sugar.
Orange juice from the tree, loaded with sugar.
Drink that, and you nullify it if you happen to take too much insulin.
Look, I'm not a doctor on this stuff.
I just know that sugar is getting a bad rap.
But the reason we're talking about this is because the United States Senate is going to start taxing drinks that have sugar in it.
And this is nothing more than the left's attempt to establish guilty behavior.
The reason they're going to tax sugar, they tell you, is because they want to improve your lifestyle.
They want you to stop eating it until you get healthier.
That's not why.
It's because sugar is in everything.
And once you start taxing Coke and Gatorade and Pepsi and 7-Up and Sprite and all these other things, then you can start taxing donuts and anything else that's got sugar.
Everything in the world is going to kill us.
Do you understand that every day we get up and something's going to kill us as though we're never going to die?
Do you realize, folks, we would live forever if we didn't do all these horrible things the left warns us against every day.
We'd all live forever.
I mean, that's the logic that they put forth.
Everybody's going to die.
Your time comes.
I know people who have exercised.
They have done everything that they have been told to do.
They have exercised.
They have moderated their diet.
They eat roots and berries and trees and they have a miserable life.
And then all of a sudden, they had some pain on the right side of the body.
They went in there and they found a benign polyp or tumor on the liver.
All the exercise and all of the eating the berries and the roots and the garbage, the bland crap that was supposed to keep you healthy did not stop the tumor.
In fact, we're now learning that drinking coffee might stave off type 2 diabetes.
I got the story in the stack today.
Three cups of coffee might reduce your chance of getting type 2 diabetes by 50%.
I think that's BS2.
Who the hell knows that they can't, but this is the kind of stuff we live with every day.
We are now told also that caffeine, oh, caffeine's the enemy, but caffeine is only 2% of coffee.
Coffee has thousands of different biological organisms in it that's good for us.
And coffee can also maybe prevent Parkinson's disease.
Now, Alzheimer's too, now, how many of you have been told that coffee's going to kill you because it's going to do something to your blood vessels and cause you to have a heart attack?
Remember the jogger Jim Fix?
Well, here's a guy who did everything right.
He ran around, he ran.
He ran and he ran around.
He worked hard.
He played hard, ate all the right stuff, drank all that stupid papaya juice, all that rot gut crap that nobody likes that they convince you to eat.
And he plops over from a heart attack at what, age 49.
Did everything right.
That's just one example.
That's the rare example of exception to the rule, Mr. Limbo.
No.
No, it boils.
We're all different.
And we are all made different.
We all have different makeups.
Our DNA is the same, but we all have something that's going to get us.
We are not the same.
We cannot be made uniform.
And they're trying to make everybody uniform.
They're trying to make everybody the same.
It just, it just irritates me to no end, especially when people get, it's like coconut oil and popcorn.
These clowns, these two anorexics at the Center for Science and the Public Interest who have a fax.
You ever seen these people on TV?
They need to put them in a horror movie with no makeup.
And these people are out there giving us lectures on this and that's going to kill us.
And they actually have succeeded in getting products banned.
And one of the products they got banned from commercial use was coconut oil because it was supposedly going to clog your arteries more than anything in the world would.
And they later found out, no, no, coconut oil is actually a very healthy oil, much healthier than trans fats, in fact.
Coconut oil, you know why coconut oil was used in popcorn?
There were two reasons.
Well, it tasted good, and when you walked in a movie theater in the old days, that was the coconut oil, it made it smell the way it smelled.
It wasn't the popcorn.
Go pop popcorn or Wesson oil, and I guarantee your house isn't going to smell like a movie theater.
It's going to smell like Wesson oil.
Go pop it in Crisco or Mozola, and I'm sorry, it's just not as good.
You pop it in coconut oil, and now you're talking.
It also holds the popcorn.
You can pop a batch, if you're selling popcorn commercially to real estate establishment like a movie theater or in a ballpark in a concessionaire, you can pop, you can pop gobs of it and serve it for two to three days.
It's still fresh.
It doesn't go bad with coconut oil.
They found this out using it.
All you have to do is put it back in the cups you're going to serve it after you stored it in bags, put it under heat lamps.
It's just like it's been popped.
Can't do that with Mozola.
You can't do that with Crisco.
Something about coconut oil holds the popcorn.
And the people who are in business to provide quality and service, I mean, they're not doing this.
It's expensive stuff.
They're not doing this simply out of altruism because they're doing it because they want you to be satisfied with the product.
Now, I know they put a little bit too much salt on it, so you go buy a $25 Coke at Yankee Stadium while you're eating the popcorn, but still, it holds the popcorn.
These people that come up with these things do it for a reason.
It actually saves expenses when you can pop a bunch of popcorn.
You don't have to guess how much you'd eat every night and throw away what you don't use.
Might rain, crowd might be not as big, movie might stink, people might not show up.
What do you do with all the popcorn?
You can't pop it to order.
People will be standing at a concession line all day.
So many things that have happened in this country for good are just based on good old-fashioned trial and error common sense.
And here come a bunch of people that could no more run a movie theater or run the car business or run the healthcare business telling us they have fixed it in two days.
A guy who's done nothing but organize a bunch of radical malcontent protesters in his whole life in Chicago.
A guy whose records in school will not be released.
A guy who's not managed one thing.
A guy who can't even keep his own White House military office from taking Air Force One out on a joyride.
We're being told is going to fix health care in two days, fix the car business, fix the banks, fix the credit cards, fix it's all going to be fixed.
Oh, and after that, we're going to save the freaking planet.
And we're going to make sure the sea levels stop rising.
All of this, this is going to be done inside of a year.
Meanwhile, all of the people who really have expertise in this are being scared to death into shutting up and going along is like the Chamber of Commerce guy.
Get this quote.
Chamber of Commerce says LA Times healthcare groups join Obama at negotiating table.
Well, the Chamber of Commerce, which is not known for going along with a bunch of panty waste liberals, if you don't get in this game, then you're on the menu.
Meaning, if you don't get in there and say, okay, I'll play with you, Mr. President, then the president's going to eat you.
The president's going to destroy you.
You're on the menu.
So to protect your interests, you have to go in there and play ball his way because nobody's got the guts to stand up to the guy.
$2 trillion in savings?
Please, where is your natural skepticism?
How much money were you going to save on your cable bill?
How much money were you going to save and all these other things the government got involved to make it right?
There's a column today in the Atlantic.
Actually, it was yesterday by Megan McCartle.
Obama's magical mystery tour of healthcare savings.
Obama and the unions and various corporate entities involved with healthcare provision in a room and got them to promise to slash 150 basis points from the annual rate of increase in healthcare spending.
How will we achieve this?
Whitehouse.gov has a fact sheet which outlines concrete proposals that came out of the meeting.
You may recognize these proposals.
They're recycled from the Obama budget.
Estimated cost savings, $215 billion over 10 years.
That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the stakeholders to find.
In other words, the $2 trillion in costs are not spelled out.
All that's spelled out is because there won't be any $2 trillion in savings.
I got to take a break, as you know, but I don't know how many times people running the government have said we're going to reduce the cost here.
We're going to reduce the cost of the Social Security.
We're going to fix that.
Nothing ever gets fixed.
It only gets broken worse.
Be back.
800-282-2882 when we go back to the phone.
Sit tight.
Here's the last paragraph of Megan McArdle's piece in The Atlantic.
It's all very well as political theater.
Politicians convene never, never working groups all the time.
But perhaps being too cynical, I suspect that the announced plan to save $2 trillion is going to be used to sell Obama's health care plan as if we'd already found the $2 trillion.
And then when, oh, darn, the service employees international union doesn't agree to hold down wages or eliminate jobs, pharma companies ratchet up the average price it charges the private sector to make sure it doesn't lose too much in its mandatory Medicaid discounts, well, we'll all just have to dig in our pockets and pay for it, won't we?
There won't be any cost cuts.
Byron York today has a story in the D.C. Examiner.
Obama's dangerous budget leaves GOP at loss for words.
What he's doing is so monstrous, so large, so out of the ordinary that Republicans, they have no way to explain this in a way that people can comprehend it.
Really?
The Republican.
Is Byron right about this?
They're looking at the budget that Obama's put forth.
The healthcare is, oh, my God.
How do we even explain this to people?
How do we explain how bad this is?
Well, the New York Times has a story that 45 conservative Democrats in the House are not happy with this budget.
I know it's only 45, but there are some Democrats who are going to have to get reelected in 2010 who are worried about it.
It may only be 45 if the number is accurate here.
But there are some who worry about it, which means there's got to be some way to explain this dangerous budget.
Dangerous budget leaves GOP at loss for words.
Well, okay, then here's the solution.
Time to start talking principles again.
Time to start talking about individual freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It's time to start talking about how this budget is going to so choke off the private sector that the opportunity for jobs and wage increases and prosperity is being eaten up by this budget.
There are infinite number of ways of ruining this budget and reminding people, warning them of the horrors that await after this thing is passed.
We'll be back.
And we're back.
Go back to the phones to Nick, 19 years old, Allegheny, New York.
Hi, Nick.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes.
I just wanted to get back to the sugar tax.
Yeah.
I think it's just totally ludicrous that they're taxing even healthy people that can afford to intake the sugar.
Well, see, this is the point.
The belief in taxing sugar is that it makes everybody unhealthy.
Yeah, but then you see all the people walking around that are skinny as whatever and they can drink all the sugar they want, you know?
Exactly.
It's just an excuse to tax people, to take the sugar out of it.
And they're coming at it the same way they come at everybody.
I've been watching some idiot on television just now during the break.
Yes, we must rave this tax on sugar so that we make people healthier and lower our health care cost.
Well, of course, who doesn't want lower costs on everything?
And who doesn't want healthier people?
Okay, fine.
So we'll raise taxes on just tax raises.
It's just increases in taxes, and they're going to find ways to increase them left and right, no matter where you go and what you do.
And they're going to justify it at every turn on making it better for you.
You don't know what's good enough for yourself, but these people care about you, and they're going to make it better for you to live in America.
And it's just, these people are trying to take away as much liberty and freedom as they possibly can to control as much of your life as possible.
If you start, Nick's got a good point here.
A lot of healthy people eat a lot of sugar.
And yet they're going to get taxed on the basis that they're unhealthy.
Next is going to come the salt tax.
Now, you want to talk about something.
Now, there's something that's related to high blood pressure, they say, and water retention.
We know a lot of people who don't like water retention, don't we?
We have to deal with that often, don't we?
Oh, it just ruins a day sometimes when there's water retention.
Well, what salt can do that?
And we have a lot of other things that could be said to be unhealthy.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, if you really want to know what this is all about, take a look at our good old beloved California, where everybody now is getting on the bandwagon to make marijuana legal because they have computed that there's billions of dollars in tax revenue to collect.
Now, this is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan always described as defining deviancy down.
Okay, you can't control some kind of harmful behavior.
You call the harmful behavior natural.
And in this case, they're so strapped for money, they'll start taxing and they'll be in charge of the growth and the sale of marijuana.
Now, somebody wants to talk to me about the relative dangers and risks posed to people who A, use sugar or who use marijuana.
And leave the pain people out.
I mean, the people that say they're smoking for medicinal purposes, I'm not informed enough.
I don't want to get an argument about it.
I don't have any phone calls from those people, certainly.
Don't worry, but just leave them out of this.
But the recreational use of marijuana, you be the judge.
I mean, if that's going to be okay, then we're going to tax that.
Sugar is going to be called as harmful or what have you.
But it's like tobacco.
Tobacco, they say, kills.
They don't ban it.
I don't know what made me think of this.
It's totally unrelated.
Something about tobacco made me think of this.
Let me see if I can find in this about Madonna and tattoos.
Ah, here it is.
Of all the luxury, it's not about Madonna and tattoos.
I'm going to make it about Madonna and tattoos.
Of all the luxuries Americans could give up in today's hard times, an $80 tattoo of a French quote from Albert Camus or Camus sure seems like a no-brainer.
Where the hell did this story run?
I don't even know where this ran.
I can't tell you where this ran.
Despite having a full-time job at, I guess it's Boston newspaper, despite having a full-time job at Boston's Huntington Theater Company, Natalie Kearns feels the pinch of recession.
In fact, the recent college graduate living with her parents to save money.
But she's not going to do without her tattoo.
The whole point of this story is tattoo is despite the economy, remain a must-have accessory, even in the recession.
Now, what I was going to say about this is at least it's a better accessory than what Madonna's doing and running around adopting African babies.
That's the latest accessory du jour of the Hollywood left.
Look, we're talking about health care and socialized medicine.
The Republicans don't know what to do about it.
I would suggest that the Republicans check askheritage.org.
The insiders at the Heritage Foundation keep their ear to the ground on what the Beltway crowd's talking about.
Socialized medicine is the buzz of the day.
Obama had a meeting yesterday, a meeting today, and voila, it will be fixed.
But the Heritage Foundation is reporting, and it's on the minds and tongues of the liberal establishment in Washington, not on the liberal mind informing you about the long lines and ration care, which typifies socialized medicine up in Canada.
In fact, they're trying to leave Canada out of it.
They're trying to say, we're going to be more like Spain.
Think of us like, but we're not Spain.
In Spain and in a lot of other countries, you can use your own money, if you have it, to go to a private hospital or private doctor.
But once Medicare becomes nationalized for everybody in this country, according to Obama's desire, you're not going to be able to go out and buy your own doctor.
Any doctor taking Medicare patients will not be able to take private patients.
They're going to totally wipe out the private sector.
This is what you can learn.
And that's a simple way of selling this or the opposition to socialized medicine.
The Heritage Foundation is a great resource here.
They've been doing their homework on socialized medicine.
You can find it all at askheritage.org.
If you want the truth, not the drive-by media spin, if the Republicans can't come up with a way to put this in perspective, go to askheritage.org and see what Obama has planned for socialized medicine.
If you want the facts and a plan on actually fixing the current healthcare system, that's available at askheritage.org as well.
There are things to do that could fix this that do not involve socialization, nationalization, government-run, single-payer, or any of this.
Askheritage.org.
It's a gold mine of data.
Rob, sorry, Bob in Columbus, Ohio.
Hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Hey, Rush, Conservative Cincinnati Bearcat Dittos to you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Hey, you don't have to worry about a Democratic Congress taxing the sugar.
Once they discover how unpalatable it's going to make that Kool-Aid for their minions that they've been dishoned out, that'll be shelved.
I wanted to get back to a point that you made that was a good one about the healthcare costs really reaching the level that they should be once a consumer pays, allowing free markets to work.
About 70 years ago, there was an association founded to pay for hospital costs only.
It ultimately evolved into the Blue Cross Association.
It was the ultimate concept of insurance.
You know, a lot of people putting away a little money every so often into a bucket.
Then when someone got sick, it had to go to the hospital anyway.
They used it.
And the buckets were full everywhere.
And there's a lot of reasons the bucket empty.
But one of the big ones is that insurance companies started to invoke a practice of medical underwriting.
So instead of just saying, if you're single, here's how much it costs for a single policy each month.
Or if you're a family policy, here's how much it costs.
They started asking a handful of questions, and it got to be more and more intricate over the years as to what they would ask and how they would adjust the rates based on that.
But when the premiums, the amount you paid for this coverage, were simply based on whether you were single or family, and certain guidelines were put into effect, like you had to have 75% of the employees at a company participate, it worked out very well.
And it's a situation that could work out well again because it would reduce premiums.
It would allow more people to be covered.
It's simply one that's probably not being brought up because of the lobbying power of the insurance industry.
Well, I don't, you know, this is a toughie.
All I know is that everybody involved on the provider and insurance side of the healthcare and the patient side hates the system.
Everybody hates it.
The only people who like it are the people trying to fix it and make it worse than what it is by building on what already exists that everybody hates.
And by that, I mean Obama relishes the opportunity to get his hands around this and make it single-payer, government-provided, public option, no private option.
That's what they're shooting for.
You're going to hear some Democrats stand up and say, I will not stand for no private options being available.
That's just a smokescreen.
They're going for public option only, meaning government registered, government paid for government.
You're still going to have insurance companies at your business doing it, but it's all going to be funneled and controlled by the government.
It's about control.
It's being sold to us on the basis it's going to streamline, it's going to make it more efficient, it's going to make it cheaper.
None of that will happen wherever this has been tried, Canada, Great Britain, Cuba, it doesn't work.
It's a triumph of emotion over common sense to think that just because we're going to do it the same way these people have tried it, it's somehow going to work.
It's not.
I would think everybody involved in this would love to get back to a system where it's market-driven, where the consumer in normal everyday medical care, we're not talking about catastrophic injuries.
Those are that's where you need the big-time insurance.
Auto accidents, catastrophes, major diseases that require a lot of hospitalization.
But normal, everyday health, when this broke down is when people demanded insurance for a $60 checkup.
When every time you wanted to go to the doctor for a sore throat, you wanted somebody else to pay for it.
Once that started, it was over.
That's the kind of stuff, if you just price it in a hospital room, just price it to what people can afford.
But we've long passed that point in time.
I mean, how many of you have looked at your hospital bill and you've seen a band-aid for what, $150?
Sorry, $500 for a Band-Aid in Wellington.
And you ask yourself, how in the world can this Band-Aid cost $500?
Well, there is an economic reason for it, and it is not greed, because I'll guarantee you, the hospital charging $500 is still losing money at the end of the year on gross operations.
They still need to go out and find wealthy people to donate the such-and-such cancer wing or the such-and-such diabetes wing.
$500 for a band-aid.
They are forced to charge that from people who can pay because of all the people who refuse to pay from illegal immigrants and others who refuse to pay at the emergency room.
A band-aid costs $500 because not everybody's paying for what they get.
And the cost of other procedures is plus medical malpractice, and all of these things get rolled into tort lawyers.
It is such a convoluted mess.
And there is no fix that involves the biggest convoluted mess in the world, the United States government, getting its hands on it even more.
Here's Chris in Dayton, Ohio.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Yeah, hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
Great.
I just wanted to kind of make a few points.
If I wanted to disagree with how a lot of people or a lot of individuals compare Obamacare to the Canada health care system, European health care system, I disagree.
We don't need to use that as an example.
We have good examples here in America.
Obamacare is pretty much a single-payer system that's been proposed.
Well, we have something like that already in place.
America pays veterans' health care.
We have a veterans' health care system that is a single-payer system, regulated health care.
If you want to see how special that health care is, all it takes is a quick trip down to the medical health care center to sit in line, wait for your care, avoid being seen, see non-providers, and even then being refused care when the money runs out at the end of the fiscal year.
The second example we have is also we have a current health care system for the military.
Several years ago, they instituted something called TRICARE.
And if you recall, there was a guaranteed health care for retirees, and they basically reneged on that.
And they said we had to go outside.
Exactly, right?
Exactly.
That is an excellent point.
And I'll add a third one.
The VA is constantly complaining about what?
Government promised and government-run health care.
That's an excellent point.
You don't have to go to Canada or the UK.
It's actually the point I've been trying to make.
People have been running this already, have broken it, and now they come along just like every other disaster claiming they're going to fix what they've broken.
They're only going to break it worse.
What?
No, no, no.
Of course, I'll be back tomorrow.
Why would I not be back tomorrow?
Well, Snurdle's apologizing for some of the calls today.
Don't sweat it.
We all have bad days.
▲
Export Selection