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June 4, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:08
June 4, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
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Your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, and even the good times.
I am Rush Limbaugh.
This is the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Great to have you here.
And a full hour of broadcast excellence is straight ahead.
800-282-2882 is the number if you want to be on the program.
The email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
This is a Reuters story.
Chrysler will have little need for the hundreds of dealers it wants to close if it completes its sale to fiat as expected.
The judge overseeing the automakers bankruptcy said Thursday.
Earlier this week, Judge Arthur Gonzalez approved the sale of most of Chrysler's assets to Italian Automaker Fiat SPA.
The 789 dealerships slated for closure will remain in bankruptcy with the old Chrysler, which also includes unwanted factories.
Now, absent a car manufacturing business, the dealerships would not seem to serve any purpose for the debtor, said the judge.
He added, there may be a case for the dealers to pursue damages.
Now, I'm, you know, I'm just your average run-of-the-mill guy.
Absent a car manufacturing business.
The dealerships would not seem to serve any purpose.
Does this what are they going to do at Chrysler?
Are they not going to make cars?
Absent a car manufacturing business.
The dealerships would not seem to serve any purpose.
I don't know, folks.
Some days I can't figure it out.
Even I can't figure it out.
And I've got a New York Times story here on this outrage that happened yesterday.
These GM and Chrysler execs up there defending their decision to close dealerships to members of Congress.
You know, I have to.
That whole circus yesterday is mind-blowing.
It's mind-boggling.
Here are members of Congress who once again get to act as innocent bystanders as though they had nothing to do with any of this, now dumping on the wrong people in the first place because Obama runs the car companies.
And it's been made abundantly clear by a number of lawyers handling the Chrysler bankruptcy that the Obama task force determined which dealerships are closing, not Chrysler.
And now these members of Congress are all upset because some of these dealerships in their districts are being closed and that's jobs lost and that's more economic bad news and they want to get to the bottom of it.
They want to find out who's responsible for this outrage.
The government once again has no role in this.
This is a miniature version of hearings on Hurricane Katrina or Fannie Mae Freddie Mac of the mortgage business.
General Motors and Chrysler are in trouble in part due to the very people conducting hearings by insisting on these wacko cafe standards, all of these restrictions that they place on the manufacturing of automobiles, the desire that members of Congress, particularly on the Democrat side, have had for years in forcing automobile manufacturers to make cars that nobody wants.
They've been beating them up in the media throughout.
Big Auto was a big enemy on the Democrat enemies list.
They've been ripping into GM for years, Chrysler that so much, but they've still been ripping into them.
And now all of a sudden, when it affects them personally, oh, we got to have hearings.
You're going to close the dealership.
What do you expect to happen when you let when these things go into bankruptcy?
What do you expect to happen?
I just, so now we're going to find make-work projects, keep the dealerships open.
What's the purpose of the hearings?
If you don't want the dealerships to close, then get out of the automobile business in the first place and let the people know how to run it run it.
Somebody will surface.
But now we've got people that have never been in the automobile business, never been in a dealership showroom, never been in a service bay, still in college.
They're dismantling the companies.
Some 31-year-old kid in the Obama Auto Task Force.
Just sit here and marvel.
We got unemployment today up 9.2%.
Snerdley was asking me during the break, what was the top unemployment rate during the Bush years?
He thinks it was 7.2%.
I don't remember it getting that high, but it may have.
Let's say it did.
Whatever it was.
I mean, when it was just barely over 5%, statistical full employment is around 4.8%, 4.7%.
And we got there under Bush.
And we held it for quite a while.
Coming out of 9-11, it might have been up there high.
It might have been, and there was a recession in a little bit of one of 2000.
Well, maybe it was 7%.
Do you remember, though?
It doesn't matter.
Unemployment rate could have been 5%.
It was 5% at one point.
5.2%.
Every day, did we not get sick and tired of seeing Democrats on TV whining and moaning about the suffering and the pain of unemployment?
And how the Bush administration only cared about the rich and didn't care about any blah, blah.
Meanwhile, Bush is extending unemployment benefits left and right.
It was just outrageous.
So today we've got 9.2% unemployment.
And a bunch of us are asking, where are the Republicans on TV pointing this out?
Where are the Republicans reacting to it?
Where are the Republicans trying to tie it to Obama?
Where are the Republicans saying, hey, stimulus is really working, eh?
How's that hope and change working for you?
9.2% unemployment.
Instead, what we get from state-controlled media, the Los Angeles Times, is a story today on all the fun the unemployed are having, the young unemployed, and the things they're doing, working at nonprofits, working at soup kitchens, traveling to Greece, living with their parents, eating off their savings, tweeting about the fun they're having in fun employment.
It's as though there's no pain and there's no suffering whatsoever in this country as a result of economic circumstances as written by state-controlled media.
Go to the audio sound bites.
Michelle Obama has weighed in on Sonia Sotomayor.
This is yesterday in Washington at the Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter Haskrule.
First Lady Michelle Obama gave the commencement address.
This is a part of what she said.
I read the story of Judge Sonia Satomayor.
She went to Princeton.
And in this story, she said that when she arrived at Princeton as a freshman, and this was nine years before I would even think about going, she said when she stepped on that campus, she said, and this is a quote, she said she felt like a visitor landing in an alien country.
Despite all her success at Princeton, and then she went on to Le Yale Law School, where she was at the top of her class in both schools.
And despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sodomayar says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up.
And when I read her story, I understood exactly how she feels.
This is the first lady of the United States of America who admits that Sotomayor is still carrying around a chip on her shoulder.
She still feels inferior because the evils of this culture and what it did to her, letting her into Princeton, finishing the top of the class.
She's got a chip on her shoulder.
She still feels inferior, still has a guilt complex, and so does Michelle Obama.
The first lady of the United States.
I understand how mad she is.
I understand the chip on her shoulder.
I understand her story.
I play this soundbite to illustrate to you, in their own words, my theory that the people running this country, Obama, his wife, Sotomayor, that they're mad.
They have, they're angry.
They're not cool and calm and collected.
And I think it was the Hannity interview yesterday.
I did three.
I think it was the Hannity interview yesterday that I point this out.
It'll be in the second installment tonight at 9 on the Fox News channel.
They're angry.
They're not cool, Comic Collected.
And there's a lingering anger that they still feel the need for retribution.
They still, they've got to show somebody how mad they still got to teach somebody a lesson.
They've got to get even.
Victor Davis Hansen writing about this, National Review Online, The Corner today.
Michelle Obama weighing in on the Sotomayor nomination.
I think it'll prove a serious political mistake since she is reverting back to her Me Too campaign mode in that she empathizes both race and the anonymous they who are not nice or not sufficiently accommodating to the other.
So Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton, its lasting effects to this day.
How many times, I've been fired seven times.
Can you imagine if I went through, I've been told, I can't tell you how many times, forget it, if you go through the rest of your life trying to show those people that they were wrong, you're never going to be happy because they're never going to admit it and you'll never know how they really feel.
And that advice was some of the best advice I ever got.
Don't use as your motivation the I'll show them in a personal sense because it poisons you.
It distracts you from the real reason you're trying to succeed.
Well, somebody needs to give this advice to Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama.
Get over it.
You've overcome it.
You are the first lady of the United States of America.
But if you want to run around and still act like you are the victim of a great injustice because you grew up in America, a country you did say as recently as a year and a half ago that you were never proud of until a year and a half ago, it really is time to get over it because this kind of attitude results in the formulation of policy.
This kind of attitude results in speeches that you make.
This kind of attitude causes you to apologize for your country all over the world.
This kind of attitude makes it possible for you to never be happy no matter what you achieve.
Which, well, what makes me think I want to be happy?
What makes me think they want to be happy is, okay, I want to be happy.
I assume that most people aspire to be happy.
I stand corrected.
realize that the left in this country is oriented toward being miserable.
Misery is their happiness.
Rage and anger is their happiness.
It is what animates them.
I can't relate to it.
I understand it, but I cannot relate to it.
Now, Victor Davis Hansen writes about this, and let me continue with what he says here.
Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton and his lasting effects to this day, and then compares it, of course, to Michelle's own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus.
In fact, Michelle's thesis was all about that.
The one that is willing to put up with the stuff people have to put up with for the education and prestige it gave, but does not really like for the presence of apparently so many suck-up rich preppy kids in their ubiquitous exclusive campus culture.
You went there, you wanted to go there, but you didn't like it when you got there because of who was there.
Hey, and treat you well, and you're still mad about it.
So he makes some observations.
Number one, many Americans were terrified about their first year in college.
Some people left farms for sophisticated urban environments and were lost.
Others were the first of their families to go to college and so on.
The Ivy League is by definition snobbish to all outside its traditional insular orbit, whether white, black, brown, country folk, foreigners, etc.
But by predicating such common discomfort on their own race and gender, Ms. Obama and Judge Sotomayor deprecate a universal human experience and instead claim it as something unique to identity politics.
When in fact, everybody's scared to death and everybody's shunned at some point, everybody's told they're worthless.
But take it back.
I don't think Obama's been told he's worthless.
I don't think he's ever really been criticized.
I don't think he's ever really been laughed at.
He doesn't deal with it well.
Number two, once more we see the schizophrenia of affirmative action, diversity, and identity politics.
The university is both obliged to select students on the basis, at least in part, of race, class, and gender, but then almost immediately faulted for a climate that in the eye of the recipient stigmatizes those whom it gives unusual consideration.
Okay, university has to get people in here that are not like you're going to have affirmative action.
You've got to get race, you've got to get gender, you've got to have all this.
Then those people that get in get mad that they got in on that basis and blame the country for it.
Proving a point that many have made over the years that affirmative action doesn't do one thing other than stigmatize the recipient.
And Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are illustrating that.
Third observation, the remedy for feeling separate at elite colleges is apparently to re-emphasize separatism based on identification with the tribe, i.e., Justice Sotomayor's senior thesis, like the one written by Ms. Obama, is predicated on ethnic and racial grievance.
She harps on and to this day harps on that she is Hispanic, that she's a Latina, that she's in Puerto Rican.
She refers in one of her, one of the things I think, maybe it was a thesis or something she wrote, she refers to the mainland Congress, which is how they refer to the U.S. Congress in Puerto Rico.
I wonder, does she think she'd been nominated to the mainland Supreme Court?
And she's from the mainland Bronx, by the way.
She's not from Puerto Rico.
Her parents were.
All of this should disturb Democrats.
Victor Davis Hansen writes, because it fuels a general and growing perception.
Soda Meyer's white male references, Eric Holder's cowards remark, the serial Obama apologies abroad, the confusion about America being an important Muslim nation among the public that something very strange is going on,
a sort of generic anger being expressed at the highest levels of government that seems fueled by long-past resentments against a perceived establishment that at times apparently is too roughly characterized as white or white male or rich or Christian or something other than poor of color or a female.
Bingo bingo.
He's exactly right.
Anger, it fuels it.
It propels these people.
I got to take a break.
I'm a little long here.
There's some updated stories here on the Sotomayor nomination.
Turns out, ladies and gentlemen, she made close to an identical wise Latina comment in 1994, so it could not be a misspeak.
Details coming up.
Sit tight.
I will pick up a Judge Soto Mayor in the next half hour.
I want to grab a phone call, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
Derek, I'm glad you waited, sir.
Well, welcome to the EIB network.
Thank you.
Thank you for taking my call, Ryan.
Yes, sir.
Just wanted to pass along that something you've been warning us about is becoming beginning to come to fruition, and that's the taxation of job benefits as imputed income.
I work for Ford Motor Company, and just on Monday, we got a notice that beginning with our June paychecks, our life insurance benefits due to IRS regulation changes will now be taxed as imputed income.
Step one.
Oh, now wait a second here.
Now, this is not health benefits.
This is life insurance.
Yes, sir.
This is life insurance.
Now, you are more informed than I.
I have not heard that this happened.
Life.
You have a company benefit that pays you life insurance?
Yes.
Yes.
That's part of our flexible benefits package.
We can purchase life insurance through the company.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Flexible benefits package.
Yeah.
That is, but that is now going to begin to be taxed as imputed income.
I'm sorry.
You know, look, people tell me I'm out of touch.
And there are sometimes I am.
The word benefit is just not in my lexicon.
I just, when I hear, I think of who benefits if I do something well, but I don't think it benefits in terms of something I receive.
So, okay, so you have flexible benefits, and so you chose life insurance, and that income is going to be imputed, and you're going to be taxes on it.
They're going to withhold it starting in June.
That is correct.
Hang on a minute.
I've got to take a break.
But I want to make sure people hear what you have.
Well, nobody's noticing.
Well, some people are noticing.
The price of oil is going up over 68 bucks.
The AAA national average for a gallon of regular gas is now $2.57.
That's up 50 cents from last month.
This is unusual.
Gasoline prices traditionally fall as we, you know, after Memorial Day and head into the quote-unquote summer driving season.
Now, these gasoline prices continue to rise.
Oil prices continue to rise.
What will happen is that as we get closer to three and then over three and start going to four, then we're going to start hearing some complaints.
And we're finally going to start hearing about the complaints.
Or will we?
People will be complaining, but will the state-controlled media report it?
Because you see, I want to prepare you people.
Gasoline prices are going up, and that's exactly what Obama wants.
Remember when they got the four bucks?
He wasn't upset with that price.
He said he was a little concerned how fast it got there, but he wasn't upset at that price.
Four bucks a gallon, we have learned, is the tipping point where you will willingly buy junk to drive as opposed to what you would like.
And that's, of course, what Obama wants.
I want to go back now to Derek in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
You work for Ford.
Is your benefit package something along the lines of they provide you a small amount of life insurance, and then you have the option to buy more if you want?
Yes, that's absolutely correct.
Regardless whether your health conditions are.
That is correct, yes.
And so Ford sent you a notice starting this month at the IRS regulations.
Read it to me.
What's it say?
I don't have it in hand rush, but what it says due to IRS regulation changes that they will have to begin taxing the life insurance benefit, the money that they spend on my life insurance benefit as imputed income.
So that means that your take-home pay will be reduced because they're going to start withholding a percentage.
It'll impute the income to your gross.
Absolutely.
And my concern is, when are the health benefits?
That's got to be coming next.
Oh, that's coming.
That's Obama's promising.
Now, they're looking at that.
I didn't know this was coming.
You've caught me off guard here.
And the reason I asked you about IRS regulations, the IRS can't do this on their own.
There has to be legislation out there.
And I've missed it, and I've just got an email from our HR department on Monday.
Now, Snurdy just shouting at me, it was in the porculus bill?
Oh!
Okay.
He's speculating that it might be in the porculus.
Nobody read the porculus bill.
And, you know, Harry Reid has not read one single opinion of Sonia Sotomayor.
Well, okay, cool.
Then we'll, I imagine this is going to be happening to a lot of other people.
Yes, I'm quite certain it will.
And then once the health benefits become imputed, well, I'm sure a magnanimous government will be happy to lift that burden from the taxpayers.
Well, your take-home pay is going to shrink.
Gasoline price is going up.
What kind of gasoline allowance does Ford give you?
Whatever I need to travel to my different dealerships.
So they reimburse you for that, but nothing.
Okay.
That's business.
Okay.
Well, well, well, okay.
So we've got some tipping points out there that are going to hit.
I really, I've got to find this out.
This is the kind of thing I normally know that they've done.
This is the kind of thing that normally is reported somewhere, if not in the state-controlled media.
You know, some of our guys and the blogosphere and other places find this stuff out.
If I have heard it, I forgot it.
It didn't make much of an impression, so I don't think I forgot it.
We'll find out.
It's a research project.
And given the research capabilities of my staff, I'll have an answer for you by Tuesday.
If I do it myself, I'll have the answer for you tomorrow.
Okay.
I'm just kidding.
Just, just, just kidding.
Sonia Sotomayor, 1994 speech.
Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion in dueling cases.
I'm not so sure that Justice O'Connor is the author of that line, since Professor Resnick attributes the line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle.
I'm not so sure that I agree with the statement.
First, if Professor Martha Minnow is correct, there can never be a universal definition of wise.
Second, I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion.
So here's two times that she has said it, despite the fact that Obama said, yeah, she needs a do-over.
She wouldn't phrase it that way.
So she said it in 1994.
She said essentially the same thing in 2001, seven years later.
This is racist.
It is bigoted.
There is no question about this.
There's a lot of stuff in the Sotomayor stack here.
This is a little funny story.
Democrats pivot on Soto Mayor.
This is in the Politico.
In diffusing the controversy over the wise Latina comment, Democrats sought to put the spotlight back on Soto Mayor's extensive legal career, assure the public she was committed to following the law and is not an activist judge.
Typically, senators are largely mom about their private conversations with high-profile nominees.
But Democrat senators, after watching Sotomayor get ripped for the past week by conservative commentators, chose to reveal much more of their conversations from Tuesday's closed-door meetings.
And Patrick Leahy said, what she said was, of course, one's life experience shapes who you are, but ultimately and completely as a judge, you follow the law.
No, Senator Leahy, twice she has said that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.
And New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has done a Chuck Schumer.
Democrat Senate campaign chief Bob Menendez today issued a stern warning to Republicans up for re-election in 2010.
Vote against Soto Mayor at your own peril.
His blast at vulnerable GOP senators was the most purely political statement from a Democrat yet in a week of Sotomayor visits to Senate offices.
It could be the most purely political statement.
It follows on the heels of Chuck Schumer saying basically the same thing.
I think that when all the senators have to cast a vote on Judge Sotomayor, if they select a negative vote, they will have to explain how it is.
You cast a no vote on someone who has great intellect, on someone who has been committed to the rule of law, who has been committed to precedent, and who has many times decided in ways that are adverse to what her personal experience would be.
So now we got Democrats out there threatening Republicans.
That's okay.
Oh, that's fine.
In fact, that's worth reporting.
That's good stuff.
The state run media.
Cheers, Menendez, and cheers Schumer.
But you let me categorize her statements as racist.
All hell breaks loose.
Oh, my God, we can't have this.
You got to take that back.
You got to retract it.
No.
Don't retract it in any way, shape, manner, or form.
Let me again share this little statement of Soto Mayor's that she made in 1994 and again in 2001.
I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.
I want to read you an excerpt of a speech by Justice Clarence Thomas in 1996.
In my mind, he writes, or spoke, impartiality is the very essence of judging and of being a judge.
A judge does not look to his or her sex or her racial, social, religious background when deciding a case.
It's exactly these factors a judge must push aside in order to render a fair, reasoned judgment on the meaning of the law.
In order to be a judge, a person must attempt to exorcise himself or herself of the passions, thoughts, and emotions that fill any frail human being.
He must overcome.
He must become almost pure in the way that fire purifies metal before he can decide a case.
Otherwise, he's not a judge.
He's a legislator.
Clarence Thomas, describing his job, 1996, compare that to Sonia Sotomayo.
Well, I would hope a wise woman with a richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion.
And the Democrats want to tell us that she's devoted to the rule of law and that we vote against her.
What?
Vote against her?
What happened?
These Republicans are going to have no chance to get the Hispanic vote?
Really, are they getting it now?
I'm going to ask this question a little blue in the face.
How can you sponsor, advocate, and demand amnesty for 20 million illegal Hispanics and not get their vote?
President Bush didn't get their vote.
John McCain didn't get their vote.
They pushed for illegal alien amnesty.
Crying out loud, if that's not going to get you the Hispanic vote, what will?
And by the same token, the Democrats destroyed Miguel Estrada.
Alberto Gonzalez, Janice Rogers Brown, and Clarence Thomas, did they lose the Hispanic vote when they did?
Did they lose the black vote when they did?
No.
So there must be other explanations for why Hispanics vote the way they do and why African Americans vote the way they do.
But these idiotic Republicans buy into the premise that one negative comment about any Hispanic or black will forever ruin the chance to get votes from Hispanics or blacks.
It's as absurd as believing the silly notion that moderates are the great purists of our culture and they don't like acrimony and those moderates don't like partisanship.
They don't like it.
At one word of mean-spirited criticism from a Republican candidate, no moderates are going to go where?
To the Democrat Party, which is the home of the most extremist, mean-spirited anger and rage-filled partisanship in our country.
Now, you, somebody smarter than I am, is going to have to explain to me how a normal campaign of criticizing your opponent's policies sends these innocent waif moderates who can't stand negativity running into the arms of the authors of negativity.
It doesn't.
It's a total fraud.
It's a position that has been put forth.
The Republicans buy into it.
It's a premise that's deeply flawed.
And all of these premises, Menendez Schuber, you vote against her at your peril.
This is a threat, and it's a demand that Republicans shut up and don't do one thing that they believe in.
Don't stand for anything because you're going to get paid.
You're going to pay for it.
You're going to lose.
And the sad thing is that so many Republicans, okay, okay, you're right, you're right, you know.
You're right, I did not guess her in my parents.
I wouldn't even say anything.
You're right.
If I say something negative about her, oh, yeah, you're right.
Okay, okay, okay, okay.
By the way, we loved Obama's speech in the middle of the way.
That was a great speech since Reagan ever gave.
We loved Obama.
Would you stop panicking in there?
I was doing show prep, and I found some.
I've been flooded with emails from payroll professionals.
Dear Rush, the cost of employer-provided coverage of life insurance greater than $50,000 has long been taxable.
Example: if a person made $35,000 and life insurance is twice annual income, then $20,000 is taxable.
Not sure what your caller is talking about for the month of June.
And there are other emails.
This is nothing new.
Now, it may be new to him only because the amount of life insurance he has or has decided to get, supplemental to what they're giving.
Maybe he's now just entered the taxable range for the first time, and that's why he's getting the notice.
But I, I mean, this is from Judith Payroll Professional.
Somebody signs payroll professional.
You're dealing with a pro.
And there are three or four others, I mean, just bunched here that say the same thing.
So that's why I didn't hear about it.
It's not new.
Ellen in Essex, Connecticut.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Openline Friday tomorrow.
I was getting ahead of myself.
How are you?
I'm doing fine, Rush.
Thank you.
Well, I'm a first-time caller and I haven't been listening to you long, but I've been listening to you these last couple of days talking about why are Michelle and Judge Sodomyer so mad?
Yes.
And I believe part of their problem is they were trained to be that way.
And let me tell you why I say that.
I grew up around the same time as them.
I actually spent some time in the projects with my family.
When push came to shove, they were told that you need an edge.
And you sit down and you profess your minority status.
You push that.
So all things being equal, they were trained to be angry about being a minority rather than makes total sense.
I think that jibes with a theory of mine that Sodomayor and the things that she's written is what she's been taught.
Oh, not only taught, they were encouraged, they were encounseled to do this.
Right.
They were taught the multicultural curriculum.
Obama himself, too, I believe, along with Michelle.
Right.
And so if you believe that, if you, and I do, I watched it.
I grew up.
I watched it with my friends.
I watched it in the projects I lived in.
And so if you're successful, so you're, you know, all things being equal, you got into the best schools, you got the scholarships, and you built on that success that way, then when you got your first job, you know, remind them that you're a Hispanic.
Remind them an oppressed minority.
Exactly.
I hate to cut you short, but I have no flexibility on time here.
Ellen, thanks much.
Get her phone number.
We might want to call her back tomorrow and expand on this.
Open Line Friday tomorrow, folks.
It should be a doozy.
That's when callers are allowed to talk about whatever they want without any control or tyranny from me.
They look forward to it, and we'll see you then.
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