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June 3, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:22
June 3, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #3
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The views expressed by the host on this program now documented to be almost always right one percent of the time.
It's great to have you with us.
I am Rush Limboa with talent on loan from God.
Here in the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, emitting vocal vibrations from behind the golden EIB microphone, telephone number if you'd like to join us, 800-282-2882, the email address L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
If you're just joining the program today, I did an interview with Sean Hannity today that's going to air in two parts on his uh Fox News Channel show at 9 o'clock tonight and tomorrow night.
40 or 45 minutes in here, and it's wide ranging, and uh no holds barred.
It was pretty good.
Even I, I don't often say that about myself.
I let others pass that kind of judgment.
This was good.
And uh so it's tonight at 9 and tomorrow night at 9, two parter on the Fox News Channel.
One of the things that he asked me about was my approval rating.
So I'm not gonna tell you what I told him about the approval rating.
I don't want to give the uh interview away, but CNN has done another one.
Another poll of me.
And it was it was revealed and announced uh yesterday by Wolf Blitzer on his show, The Situation Room.
Our CNN opinion research corporation poll asked favorable, unfavorable numbers for most of the top Republicans who we're hearing a lot from lately.
And look at these numbers.
Colin Powell, he's at 70% favorability, then John McCain, 58, and then it goes down.
Sarah Palin, 46, Romney 42, Dick Cheney, 37, Newt Gingrich, 36, Rush Limba is uh only a 30% favorability.
They're polling my favorable unfavorable numbers at state run CNN.
30%, do you realize I don't know what their sample was.
I guess the American voters, American public, I don't know.
He didn't uh let's see.
Uh favorable they didn't specify what the sample was.
But I'm gonna tell you if if if 30%, if 30% of the country likes me or approves of me, or at least in their poll, that makes me more popular than most Americans.
You got net.
This is not bad for a Muslim nation, folks, for a guy like me to have 30% approval in a Muslim country.
I'll take that any day.
Well, that's what Obama said.
He went over there and he said that the United States is a Muslim country.
Here I got 30% approval in a Muslim country, I'll take it.
Can you can you believe they're out there polling me?
Here is Dingy Harry, the Senate majority leader.
This is the kind of ignorance that is on parade every day in Washington, D.C. I understand that during her career she's written hundreds and hundreds of opinions.
I haven't read a single one of them.
And if I'm fortunate before we end this, I won't have to read one of them.
Yet he supports apparently he's read some Clarence Thomas opinions because he said he wasn't very impressed with them.
But here's a guy who admitted admittedly has not read and doesn't want to read any of her opinions, and yet is going to blindly support her.
By the way, I looked up CNN's favorability numbers uh last night after I heard that they did a poll on me.
And believe me, folks, when you have 600,000 of over 200 million people watching you, I would say you have a disapproval number that's about 95% or 97%.
CNN's favorability is in the toilet.
Nobody is watching in prime time CNN and MSNBC combined do not get anywhere near the ratings Fox News Channel has.
Fox News beats them when you add their audience.
If 30% of the country watched CNN, they'd be celebrating.
They'd be throwing parties.
I have a favorable opinion of 30% of the American people in a Muslim country.
That's big.
Bloomberg News.
Did pension debts ruin General Motors?
This is commentary by Roger Lohenstein.
I said they did, he writes, in While America Aged, a book published last year, the thesis was that many decades of inflated pension and health care benefits forced GM to redirect its free cash flow to retired workers.
As a result, there was little or nothing left for the shareholders.
It was as if, I wrote, the company had secretly been sold and now belonged to the retired workers and their dependents.
That turned out to be only partly right.
When GM is reorganized, the UAW will probably end up with 17% of the stock.
The government will get the rest.
But among the obligations that caused GM to file for bankruptcy, two of them are directly related to worker entitlements.
Now, we all know this.
And we've all made this accusation, we've pointed this out.
And they uh they always say, well, but GM made the deal.
GM made the deal.
I mean, they made the deal.
They made the deal at what cost and how?
Was a gun figuratively held their heads?
Was a worldwide strike planned?
I mean, they made the deal.
In 2003, General Motors sold 13.5 billion dollars in bonds, one of the biggest debt offerings ever.
They plowed the money into the pension fund.
In 2007, after the UAW did go on strike, General Motors agreed to funnel more than 30 billion more into a special trust for retiree health care.
Both the pension bond and the retiree trust obligation helped topple GM into Chapter 11.
Of course, they weren't the only causes.
The Great Recession was the biggest proximate cause, and you can add years of poor engineering and corporate bureaucracy and a culture that was too hidebound to change.
Though the country has rightly focused on the mortgage mess, retirement obligations still loom as a daunting obligation.
Thanks to plunging stock markets, which have decimated retirement accounts, they are more pressing than ever.
But pensions.
See if all of GM's problems, the retiree burden provides the most trenchant lessons.
Some companies will uh always design better cars than others.
But at least if a company builds a lemon, it can try again, or it can close a factory and shrink to a size appropriate to it, uh appropriate to its sales.
But pensions are different.
Once promised, they can never be rescinded.
General Motors' pension hailed from a negotiation with the UAW in 1949.
The result, known as the Treaty of Detroit, produced a pension of only $125 a month.
GM was selling cars like hotcakes, its labor force was young, the pension was easy to afford.
But observers such as Peter Drucker, then a young consultant, wondered what would happen if GM's business turned south while its pension obligation remained.
And the pension didn't just remain, it grew, and so did its health care obligation.
GM stayed current on pensions, but the money it funneled into retirement plans left less for engineering and restyling.
By 2002, General Motors' pension fund was 20 billion dollars underfunded.
Pensions.
This is it we'll we'll link to this.
It's at Bloomberg, it's a commentary, but this is excellent stuff on the big contributor to General Motors' downfall.
And the same thing is happening to California, is a point made in this piece.
As General Motor goes, so goes California in pensions.
They've got the same obligations.
They've got uh uh the teachers' retirement fund, the public employees retirement system, they've got pension problems out the wazoo uh out there.
And that's gonna lead to uh has led General Motors to being in the same or California to be in the same circumstance as um General Motors is.
And of course, there's some towns in California that have filed bankruptcy, Vallejo, and we talked about this when it happened.
Their obligations to their public employees, the policemen, the firemen, and so forth.
There was no way they were ever going to be able to pay them and their pensions.
And towns broke.
And there's some others in California, plus unemployment reached 25% in a couple of California towns.
And it's all money that was contracted to be paid to people who are no longer working and producing anything.
I don't know what the solution is.
Well, the solution is a standardized bankruptcy, Chapter 11.
Not one that's run by the government that's basically of by and for the government.
There are policies in place to handle businesses that can no longer meet their obligations.
Point is, though, folks, it's it's you can say what you want.
Yes, it was promised, and uh yes, the obligation exists.
But there is, it says not even a theory, it's a lesson.
There is just some common sense here.
At some point, when you promise to pay people who are no longer working and they live longer, and you end up paying people more after they are retired than you ever paid them when they work for you, the system that does that is gonna collapse.
You just how many of you work for nothing?
I don't mean you're getting ripped off.
How many of you will accept a job for no income?
It's the same thing on the other side.
How many of you would accept payment and not do a day's work?
A lot of people would.
Now, how long would you accept?
Let's say somebody pays you 25,000 or 30,000 a year to not work, and you don't work.
At what point are you gonna think this isn't right?
Now you might say it's owed to you because you did put in a lot of time at the place that used to pay you.
But don't think of it in those terms.
To understand what's happened, think here of not working and being paid, not producing anything and being paid, and asking how long that could last.
It can't.
So the lesson here is this had no it this was destined to happen.
And this is Mr. Lowenstein's point writing the piece.
It was destined to happen after a certain number of years and the almost predictable market decline.
You can't predict when a market's gonna decline, but you know it will because it cycles.
But this whole concept of paying people that don't work.
Uh and then paying them health care when they're not working.
Well, you okay, social security?
I give you social security.
Social security is gonna blow up.
And by the way, have you heard what the Federal Reserve Chairman is saying?
Why, it's amazing.
Let's see.
The Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warns that long-term budget deficits threaten financial stability.
Okay, time to warn us after they're done.
Warn us after it's done.
Now, this is gonna be laid off on George W. Bush.
It's Bush's fault.
Everything gets blamed on Bush.
I'll tell you what this is.
This is the second time this has been said.
Obama said it first.
These deficits, as though he had nothing to do with them, threaten our stability.
Bernanke's saying the same thing.
Hello, major tax increases for everybody.
That's what this means, including your health care benefits provided by your employer.
They will be taxed.
At some point, look for the mortgage interest deduction to be lowered.
Just as Obama is going to lower the Charitable deduction?
Now you're saying no, Russ, that'll never happen with the housing market, they need people to get back in the housing market.
They're gonna need money more than they need you in a house.
They're going to need money because folks, they are printing money and monetizing our debt.
They have taken the income of people, children or grandchildren, not yet born.
Oh Lordy, I don't believe this.
Now they got am I seeing what I think I see?
Oh, this is wonderful.
This is work this is working better than I ever thought.
Now they got Barbara Boxer on MSNBC commenting on the fact I might support Sotomayora if I learned that she's pro-life.
By the way, folks, there's a great story in the Financial Times today by Michael Levine, who is a scholar and lecturer at New York University School of Law, and it's a long piece, but I I can summarize this.
It basically, he basically writes that Washington blew as in made a huge error in the General Motors bankruptcy, but they did it on purpose.
Obama blew up General Motors simply to save the Union.
Pure and simple.
It was political payback.
And in the Wall Street Journal, I'm sorry, Washington Post today, there is an editorial.
And there's this little tidbit of information in the editorial.
The United Auto Workers Fund will still get $585 million of GM's cash every year in the form of a dividend on preferred stock.
The title of this editorial is Did Did Obama at least get a good deal for the money?
For the union, yes, for nobody else.
Dealerships are closing.
But the United Auto Workers' Fund, now you might be saying, but Russia, a lot of auto workers are gonna lose their jobs or closing factories.
Yeah, but they're not gonna lose their health care, and they're not gonna lose their pensions.
But more importantly, it's the union leaders, the people that take the earnings of union workers, siphon off the donations, and donate to the Democrat Party.
That's who benefits here.
The gettelf thinkers of the world and his lieutenants.
As part of this bankruptcy, the United Auto Workers Fund, their health care trust will get $585 million every year of GM's money.
Whether there's a profit or not, in the form of a dividend on preferred stock.
Here's good news for you.
This is from Wired.com.
I'm not making this up.
I'm gonna read this to you exactly as it's written.
The Earth has gotten a billion-year life extension.
The Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life's horizon by more than one billion years.
They calculated this at Caltech.
Now, if they are going to expand the life expectancy of Earth to 2.3 billion years, could we please start talking about drilling for oil and not having to drive around little tinfoil cars and not watch the Iranians and the tricons and the North Korea, North Koreans go nuclear while we go to windmill and solar power.
I know we need to do health care first, and then maybe we can talk about this other stuff.
So the Earth has gotten a life.
What is this due to the global warming crowd that says we're in the process of destroying the planet by the middle of this century?
A you know the news today, this whole news day.
That it's a nightmare, that I did not do the interview with Sean Hannity, that Barack Obama did not say America is a Muslim nation, that Lara Logan did not say that the Muslim world's hopes reside on the shoulders of one man.
That Newsweek did not say that Osama bin Laden is a myth.
He's not important anymore.
And when you take those two things together, then you what you have here, state controlled CBS, state controlled Newsweek have made Obama the titular head of the Muslim world.
It used to be Obama that inspired Osama, but now it's Obama.
And then if their hopes, the Muslim world's hopes rest on his shoulders, what are their hopes?
They want their share of the stimulus.
Do they want new little cars?
Or do they want no Israel to exist?
What are their hopes?
This has to be a dream.
I know I'm going to wake up and I'm not going to believe any of this really happened.
And I'm going to be relieved that it didn't.
All right, more evidence that I'm dreaming.
More.
Kill the music here, my folks.
I just I don't want you to repeat this.
This is just between us, but rarely has something worked so well so soon.
This is amazing.
We go to the audio sound.
Shh, don't tell anybody else.
But this is working like a charm.
We go to state run MSNBC.
Two soundbites.
First, Newt Gingrich, now Rush Limbaugh.
Some conservatives starting to eat their words.
They called uh Sonia Sotomayor racist, and now it looks like perhaps warming to her nomination.
I can see a possibility of supporting this nomination.
If I could be convinced that she does have a sensibility toward life in a legal sense, of course, in a real sense.
State-run MSNBC mere moments ago.
Also mere moments ago, the same infobabe, Contessa Brewer had a guest, Barbara Boxer, California Senator.
Question.
Rush Limbaugh says he's not retracting his racist comment.
That being said, is anything that a tangible substance that the Republicans can pin on Sonia Sotomayor to try to block this confirmation?
Well, I would hope they don't approach this nominee with the idea of blocking her.
I would hope they would approach this nominee.
Now wait a minute.
Stop, stop, stop re queue that.
Uh this is just unbeliev their entire philosophy is to block conservative Republican nominees, regardless.
What is it?
Let me find something here.
Well, let me let me uh play the sound button in its tirely.
So the first bite, Rush Limbaugh eating his words.
Then they say, no, not quite eating his words.
And then they ask Barbara Boxer about me, as I was a bulletin here.
Well, I would hope they don't approach this nominee with the idea of blocking her.
I would hope they would approach this nominee in a way as a welcoming to the Senate.
And now let's hear from her.
Let's hear what her story is.
Let's look at her record, and hopefully they can join us and support her.
She has more qualification than anyone who's been appointed to the bench in the last hundred years.
She has so many.
Did you hear that?
She's a mainstream jurist, an incredible life story.
And as I say, I think to approach it from the standpoint of how can we stop her is a very sad way to approach a nominee.
She has more qualification than anyone who's been appointed to the bench in the last 100 years.
Barbara Boxer said that.
She has so many cases to go over.
She's a mainstream jurist, incredible life story.
We all have an incredible life story.
Thomas Sowell, let me find this.
Where's my Sotomayor stack?
Thomas Sowell today has an excellent point on this.
He writes as the state-run media circles the wagons around Judge.
Well, he didn't say state-run, he said mainstream, but I'm editorializing because I can.
As the state-run media circle the wagons around Sotomayor to protect her from the consequences of her own words and deeds, its main arguments are distractions from the issue at hand.
A CNN reporter, for example, got all worked up because Rush Limbaugh had used the word racist to describe the judge's words.
Since it has been repeated like a mantra that Judge Sotomayor's words have been taken out of context, let us look at Rush Limbaugh in context.
The cold fact is that Rush Limbaugh has not been nominated to sit on the highest court in the land with a lifetime appointment to have the lives and liberties of 300 million Americans in his hands.
Whatever you may think about his choice of words, those words and the ideas behind them do not change the law of the United States.
The words and actions of Supreme Court justices do.
Anyone who doesn't like what Rush Limbaugh says can simply turn off the radio or change the station, even though nobody ever does.
But you cannot escape the consequences of Supreme Court decisions, nor will your children or your grandchildren.
Thomas Sowell.
That's...
I don't need to add anything to it other than to say it is typically brilliant.
Now, I just got a note in the email during the break.
And it is a uh it's a little post here by the noted and estimable Diana West.
Uh, whom you can find in various places on the internet.
She writes this.
Dick Morris, and this is really this is funny as hell.
This this open here.
Um Dick Morris and Eileen Gann describe the real Saudi bow now in motion as Al POTUS touches down in the kingdom on magic carpet one.
There he is utterly dissing our kindred ally Israel with the big bypass, determining that Israeli babies are the gravest threat to Middle East peace, reaching out to Iran, and now this.
As he goes to Saudi Arabia, the United States State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, has announced that it has accepted the ground rules for media coverage of the Obama visit to the royal family and its domain, meaning Hillary Clinton State Department has accepted the ground rules of King Abdullah.
The ground rules of Saudi Arabia.
They are these.
Reporters will only be allowed to cover the actual meetings between the Saudis and Obama.
Reporters will not be permitted to visit the rest of the country or to report on anything else they see during the trip to Saudi Arabia.
Those reporters who violate these terms are subject to arrest and imprisonment by the Saudi government.
Hillary and Obama accepted those terms.
as did the state-run media.
They really are the state-controlled media.
They are even controlled by a Muslim country.
A real Muslim country.
That would be Saudi Arabia.
Bow down, infidel White House press corps.
Lower, lower, back, back, back into the hotel.
I can hear the Saudi enforcer now, Robert Al-Gibbs perhaps, searching around online for the actual State Department communique.
I found a report about it at Times website.
Here are the instructions.
The Saudi government is permitting journalists accompanying President Obama entry into the country without a visa or the usual customs procedures, while in Saudi Arabia, therefore, journalists are expressly prohibited from leaving the hotel or engaging in any journalistic activities outside of coverage of al-Potis.
Those who do so risk arrest and detention by Saudi authorities.
Diana West says this is not just an outrage.
This is an historic disgrace.
That Obama and Hillary accepted these rules.
Michael Scherer at Time Magazine Corvus Communications, which represents the Saudi government in the U.S., emailed reporters Monday night with a statement saying the announcement of restrictions, which was sent from the State Department is incorrect.
The Corvus email says the Saudi ambassador has said journalists can get visas and will be free to go wherever they would like.
I am not yet sure the source of the confusion will update when I know.
Looks now as if some Saudi flak agency in the U.S. has a charge of the U.S. State Department, not to mention the first amendment.
Whatever the ground rules for traveling U.S. media turn out to be, the fact remains, as Dick Morris and Eileen Gann noted, the U.S. government accepted not only Saudi rules but Saudi justice for the state run media.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
All right.
Um I'm gonna get your phone calls here just a second, but I got to play two more sound bites.
This is one of the greatest stories.
Two kids from Maryland high school being recruited by Nebraska University.
They fly out there, they go through the recruitment, they see the place.
On their return flight home, in coach is a black man, huge Nebraska fan.
And they talked to him throughout the flight.
They have no idea they're talking to Justice Clarence Thomas.
When they found out who it was, they went to their school and they asked the school to have Clarence Thomas come give a speech, commencement speech, which he did.
We have two sound bites here.
Last night, Washington, D.C. WRC TV Channel 4, they did a report on this.
It's uh Terrence Stevens, the high school graduate here.
Uh his reaction to meeting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
I was amazed that this guy knew so much about us as football players and as people.
And that was that was that was shocking in itself.
So I was definitely I felt honored to be known by somebody of his caliber and and and of his strength, but he was just a regular old guy.
He was I mean, he was sitting in coach, which really shocked me.
Sitting in coach.
Really sure, just a regular old guy.
Knew all about him because he's a Nebraska fan, knew they were being recruited.
Now, Nebraska eventually did get one of these kids, Stanford, the other kids going to.
I don't know which one's which.
Here's Justice Thomas and a portion of his address to the students.
These young men had no idea who I was when I formed my first impressions of them.
To them, I was just another stranger.
They were wonderful ambassadors for your school and for their fellow students.
And that's Justice Thomas doing the commencement speech that these two kids wanted him to give after they met him on the plane for most of the trip back to Maryland.
They had no idea who they were talking to.
They did, but he knew that they were football players, that they had been recruited by Nebraska, but they were looked being looked at by Nebraska.
And he's a huge Nebraska fan.
This is why I knew he's sitting back in coach.
And you know what the the the aside from what's obviously great about this story is when the kids go back and ask the principal or whoever, can't get this guy to come speak, they did.
That's that's what's amazing.
I thought I turned the bars off.
Oh, all right.
Sorry.
Sorry, but I meant to turn the bars off.
Now to the phones, as I promised.
Jim and Reno, great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Well, it's really an honor to speak to you and a pleasure to speak to Snerdley.
Thank you.
I'm calling to tell you about Nevada's first stimulus project to be funded.
It is a tourist railroad, and even though we already have a privately run tourist railroad in Virginia City, who has never taken a dime of public money, these guys uh are giving Harry Reed the credit, the put the government commission to build a competing tourist railroad, are giving Reed the credit for bringing twenty-three million dollars of highway funds to what I guess should be a public transportation project, but the tickets are gonna cost about fifty bucks.
So we're calling this the railroad to nowhere.
Well, that's what I was gonna ask you.
Where is this uh train gonna go?
This is the funny part.
This is the one um the the first three million dollars that they fund is gonna run the tracks past the brothels in Mount House, Nevada.
This is the Red Light Express that they talked about on Fox News.
They got it a little bit.
You mean the stimulus?
This might be some of the best stimulus money spent.
They're gonna build a tourist train past a bunch of whorehouses.
Yeah, I uh if we can use the word whorehouse, that's what they're gonna do.
Well, you see, see, they built the whorehouses on the original right-of-way for this old railroad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're talking time to run around.
I mean, this now we're talking.
Oh, this is really fantastic.
And here's the funny part is when this project was first proposed, the the entire budget was sold at twenty million dollars.
Well now they're up to about sixty-five to seventy million.
So they're, you know, this this twenty-three million is supposedly going to finish the project.
So then they're going to really face the test because they claim that a hundred and thirty-five thousand people a year will will ride this.
And it's just the amazing thing.
Once these people figure that out, it's a train that drives right past the brothels.
You got a point.
I'm at 35,000.
That's low, man.
Can you imagine taking your son on this train and he looks up at you and says, Daddy, what's a brothel?
I don't know.
Oh, no, no, no.
That's that's uh.
The kids will know that before the father knows it.
Um unless they're from Fort St. Louis, especially if they're from Fort St. Lucy or Rio Linda.
Well, these days that's true.
I mean, unfortunately.
Well, that's that's the first that's the first stimulus project that's actually going to go out to bid here in Nevada.
And we're so proud of Harry Reed.
You ought to be.
I mean, I this is something that the people who live in Nevada can be really proud of.
A tourist train to the whorehouses.
First stimulus project.
I'm telling you, I am dreaming this show.
Uh Rick in Naperville, Illinois.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, a hundred percent favorable ratings from and goodos from Socialist Occupied Chicago.
Yeah, thank you, sir.
Yes.
Unfortunately, I'm not among those, so don't count me in that.
But uh I just wanted to say um qualifications first, but I believe we should only select people for our highest court who identify themselves as Americans much as you have, without an additional ethnic modifier as to who they are.
Now, Soda was born in Brooklyn.
I was born in Chicago.
My parents were Sicilian.
Can you imagine then they came here poor, and if I started walking around calling myself as a male, a Sicilio, what kind of a qualification would that be for anything?
Uh it wouldn't even get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks, I don't think, or Caribou, let alone.
Well, no, no, don't make me no, no, no, no.
Don't make me go there.
I'm not gonna I don't you mean what what what would you what would what if you walked into a place that I'm a Sicilian American, what would happen to you?
No, I'm not gonna answer that.
I'm not I'm not looking.
Even though I think this show's a dream and it's not really happening, I'm not gonna answer that question.
Well, your ethnicity as a qualification, expecting an out a positive outcome as qualification of your ethnicity should automatically disqualify you.
It's just as bad as picking something.
She is obsessed with it.
Like I like I like I tell you in that speech in 2001 that she gave uh at Berkeley, her diversity speech, which was printed by La Raza, she mentions Latina 39 times, Hispanic six times, Puerto Rican six times.
Uh her Wikipedia entry mentions Latino thirty times, Hispanic seventeen times, Puerto Rican twenty-four times.
She's a fixated on being uh Latino or Hispanic.
She fixated on it.
Uh I would not not support her just because she's Latina.
No.
Look at if this woman, as we suspect, is hiding uh and trying to mask pro-life sentiments.
You got to consider her.
That's all I'm saying.
And my on-camera interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News Channel happened this morning, airs tonight and tomorrow night, the first of two parts tonight at nine o'clock on the uh Fox News channel.
And speaking of stimulus, we're gonna build in Nevada a tourist train, a railroad that will run right to the brothels.
The whorehouses.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, a train, stimulus money train by running by whorehouses.
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