Your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos, and even the good times, I am Rush Limbaugh.
This is The Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Great to have you here.
And a full hour of broadcast excellence is straight ahead.
800 282 at 2882 is the number if you want to be on the program.
The email address, Lrushbow at EIB net.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 uh judge overseeing the automaker's bankruptcy said Thursday.
Earlier this week, Judge Arthur Gonzalez approved the sale of most of Chrysler's assets to uh 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.
I'm you know, I'm 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 gonna do at Chrysler?
Are they not gonna 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.
Now I've got a New York Times story here on this outrage that happened yesterday, these uh 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 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 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's so much, but they've still been ripping into them.
And now all of a sudden, when it affects them personally, oh, we gotta have hearings.
You're gonna 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 gonna find make work projects, keep the dealerships open.
So 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'll surface.
now we got people that have never been in the automobile business, never been in a dealership, showroom, never been in a in a in a service bay, still in college, they're dismantling the companies.
Some 31 year old kid in the Obama auto task force.
Uh 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 it may have.
Let's say it did.
Whatever it was, I mean, when it was just barely over 5%, you'll f 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 uh, 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 now the Bush administration only cared about the rich and didn't care about any blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 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 much the 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 Hascruel.
First Lady Michelle Obama gave the commencement address.
This is a part of what she said.
I read the story of Judge Sonia Satamayor.
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 Liale Law School, where she was at the top of her class in both schools.
And despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sotomayar 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 in to Princeton, finishing the top of the class.
She 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, you put Soto Mayor, but they're mad.
They have they're angry.
They're not cool and calm and collected.
They're angry.
And I I think it was the Hannity interview yesterday.
I did three.
I think it was the Hannity interview yesterday that I point this out that'll be in the second installment tonight at nine on the Fox News Channel.
They're angry.
They're not cool, comma collected.
And there's a there's a 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 gotta teach somebody a lesson.
They gotta 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 no 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 a 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 makes me think I want to be happy that what makes me think they want to be happy is, okay, um uh I want to be happy.
I assume that most people aspire to be happy.
I stand corrected.
I realize that the left in this country is oriented toward being miserable.
Miserily, 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 Hanson writes about this, and let me continue with what he says here.
Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton and is 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 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 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 shunned at some point where 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 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 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 he she is Hispanic, that she's 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 uh 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.
Anger, it fuels it, it propels these people.
I gotta take a break on a little long here.
There's some updated stories here on the Sotomayor nomination.
Turns out, ladies and gentlemen, she made an id uh uh close to an identical wise Latina comment in 1994, so it could not be a misspeak.
Oh details coming up.
Sit tight.
I will pick up a judge Sotomayor 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 uh EIB network.
Thank you.
Thank you for taking my call, Ryan.
Yes, sir.
Just wanted to pass along that uh something you've been warning us about, uh, is becoming the is beginning to come to fruition.
Um, and that's the uh 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 gene paychecks, our life insurance benefits due to due to uh IRS regulation changes will now be taxed as imputed income.
Step one.
Whoa.
Now wait a second here.
Now, this is not health benefits, this is life insurance.
Yes, sir.
This is life insurance benefits.
I had now you're 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 a flexible benefits package.
We can purchase life insurance through the company.
Oh, oh, okay.
Okay, okay.
Flexible benefits package.
Yeah, yeah.
That is, but that is now going to begin to be taxed as imputed income.
I'm sorry, you know, I I look at 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.
Uh but I don't think of benefits in a term something I receive.
So you have flexible benefits, and so that you're you chose life insurance, and that income is going to be imputed and you're gonna pay taxes on it.
They're gonna withhold it starting in June.
That is correct.
Hang on a minute, I gotta take a break.
And I want to make sure people hear what you have.
Well, nobody's noticing.
Well, some people are noticing the price of oil's going up over sixty-eight bucks.
The triple A national average for a gallon of regular gas is now two dollars and fifty-seven cents.
That's up fifty 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 continues to rise.
Uh what will happen is that as we get closer to three and then over three and start going to four, then we're gonna start hearing some complaints.
And we're finally gonna 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 um Derek in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
You work for Ford.
You is your is your benefit package something along the lines of they 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 health conditions are.
That is correct, yes.
And so Ford sent you a notice.
Mm-hmm starting this month at the IRS regulations.
Read it to me.
What's it say?
Uh I don't have it in hand, Rush, but uh what it says due to IRS regulation changes that they won't 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 means that your take-home pay will be reduced because they're gonna start withholding a percentage.
It'll impute the income to your gross.
Absolutely.
And and my my my concern is when are the health benefits?
That's gotta be coming next.
Well, oh, that's coming.
That's uh Obama's promising.
Now they're looking at that sc I didn't know this was coming.
This is this you've caught me off guard here.
And the reason I ask you about IRS regulations, the IRS can't do this on their own.
There has to be legislation out there.
And I if it if I'm I've missed it, and I've I've uh Yeah, we we just got an email from our HR department on Monday.
Snerdly just shouting at me it was in the porculus bill.
Oh, okay.
Uh he's speculating that it might be in the porculous bill.
Uh-huh.
Bob, very very.
Nobody read the porculus bill.
And uh, you know, Harry Reid has not read one single opinion of Sonya Sotomayor.
Well, okay, cool.
Um then we'll we'll uh this uh I imagine this is gonna be happening to a lot of other people.
Yes, I'm I'm I'm quite certain it will.
And then once the health benefits become imputed, well, I'm sure our magnanimous government will be happy to uh lift that burden from from the taxpayers.
Well, your tax your your your take-home pay is gonna shrink.
Gasoline price is going up.
What kind of gasoline allowances Ford give you?
Uh whatever, whatever I need for to uh to travel to my different dealerships.
So they reimburse you for that, but but nothing Okay.
Well that's business.
But but person okay.
So well, okay.
So we got some tipping points out there uh that that are gonna hit.
I really we I gotta find this out.
I I this this is the kind of thing I normally know that they've done.
Uh this is the kind of thing that that normally is reported somewhere, if not in the state control media.
You know, some of our guys in the blogosphere at other places find this stuff out.
This is 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, um I'm just kidding.
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 uh in 2001.
Seven years later.
This is racist.
It is bigoted.
There is no question uh about this.
There's a lot of stuff in the in the Sotomayor stack here.
This is a little funny story, Democrats pivot on Sotomayor.
This is in the uh politico.
In diffusing the controversy over the wise Latina comment, Democrats sought to put the spotlight back on Sotomayor's extensive legal career, assure the public she was committed to following the law and is not an activist judge.
Typically, senators are largely mum 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 reelection in 2010.
Vote against Sotomayor 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.
What I don't know that 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 that's good stuff.
We we 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 gotta take that back.
You gotta retract it.
No.
Don't retract it in any way, shape, manner, or form.
Let me again share this little statement of uh Sotomayor'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.
Well, what?
Vote against her?
What happened?
These Republicans are going to not have no chance to get the Hispanic vote.
Really, are they getting it now?
I'm going to ask this question all in 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 this 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.
You, somebody smarter than I am, is gonna 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 it's a it's a position that has been put forth the Republicans by into it.
It's a premise that's deeply flawed, and all of these premises, Menendez Schubert, you vote against her at your peril.
This is a threat, and it's a 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 gonna get paid, you're gonna pay for it, you're gonna lose.
And the sad thing is that so many Republicans, okay, okay, you're right, you're right.
You know, I I uh I you're right.
I don't vote against her in my parents.
I I won'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 year.
Yeah, that was a great speech since Reagan ever.
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 uh the notice.
But I I mean, this is this is from Judith's payroll professional.
Somebody signs payroll professional.
You're dealing with a pro.
And and there are three or four others, I mean, just bunched here that uh say the same thing.
So that's why I didn't hear about it.
It's not new.
Uh Ellen in Essex, Connecticut.
Welcome to the open uh the Rush Limbaugh program.
Open line Friday tomorrow.
I was getting ahead of myself.
How are you?
I'm doing fine, Rush.
Thank you.
Well, um, I'm a first-time caller, and uh haven't been listening to you long, but I've been listening to you uh these last couple of days talking about uh why are Michelle and Judge Sodemeyer so mad.
Yes.
And I believe part of their problem is they were trained to be that way.
And let me let me tell you why I say that.
I grew up around the same time as them.
Yeah, I actually spent some time in the projects with my family.
Um push came to shove, they were told that you need an edge.
And uh you sit down and you you profess your minority status.
You you push that.
Um all things being equal, they were trained to be angry about being a minority rather than makes total sense.
I think uh that that jibes with a theory of mine that soda my or and and the things that she's written is what she's been taught.
Oh, not only thought they were encouraged, they were in counseled 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.
Right, right, right, right.
An oppressed minority.
Exactly.
I hate 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 uh tomorrow, folks.
Should be a doozy.
That's when callers are allowed to talk about whatever they want without any control or tyranny from me.