You know, Time magazine is, what if they had 40 covers, 40 covers of Obama in like 20 weeks?
And it says here, Obama's stimulus plan failing by its own measure.
And here's how it's written by a story by a guy named Stephen Gandel.
And the lead to the story is the $787 billion stimulus plan turning out to be far less stimulating than its architects expected.
See, this is where everybody's missing it.
This stimulus plan is doing everything its architects intended it to do, and that's prop up the states first and prop up Democrats second, prop up unions first and second, and not ever stimulate the economy.
Now, I have to think, for Time magazine to run this story, there has to be some sense that they better cover their rear end on this journalistically.
And this, Time Magazine, they have been in the tank.
It seems like every week or every other week, Obama is on the cover.
Time magazine or Newsweek.
And if it's not Obama, it's Michelle Mybel on the cover.
From CNN Money, National Health Care May Naim.
Latest polling looks great for President Obama, shows that Americans love national health care.
Yeah, but what's the rub?
Well, if history and polling trends are any guide, that'll change.
Voters right now are in what the famous pollster Daniel Yankilovich called the wishful thinking stage, a moment in the life of an opinion analogous to the dreamy early days of a relationship.
This piece goes on to say that Americans love the idea of health insurance for all until they realize how much it's going to cost them.
And this is not speculation here.
Similar scenarios played out in 1992 when the Clintons pushed for their health plan and in 1998 or 1988 after Congress passed an insurance plan to protect the elderly against the costs of catastrophic illness.
1988, polls had shown that Americans overwhelmingly favored such a plan in the abstract and large bipartisan majorities passed it in both houses.
Only the top 40% of seniors would have paid a tax surcharge to fund it.
But those were the people who tended to carry supplemental insurance already.
And once they realized what was happening, they howled in a way that legislators couldn't ignore.
Remember this?
This is when Rostenkowski, Daniel Rosty got beaten up by constituents in Chicago outside his car.
Congress repealed the provision.
It never took effect.
Today, with more ambitious reforms on the table, a scenario not unlike 88 could be taking shape.
Dig deep into the latest polling.
You'll find that while Americans believe health care is a serious problem, 77% say they're satisfied with the quality of health care they receive.
Now, why is Obama then pushing it?
Well, Obama is pushing health care.
And he wants this done by August.
He's got to get this done by August.
He wants to get this done by the recess because the economy is tanking.
I'm going to tell you why he wants it fast.
The economy is tanking.
Obama knows better than anyone else that it's tanking.
And he also knows that by the end of the year, he cannot pass health care because the state of the economy is going to be so bad that everybody will know it.
So the tactic here is speed and deception.
The same tactic being used with Sotomayor in her confirmation hearings.
The public is not going to be in any mood for a massive new spending program of any kind when the depth of the current spending and its disastrous consequences are known, and they will be known, and they are going to get worse.
The circumstances are going to get worse.
Mort Vuckerman today has a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
The economy is even worse than you think.
Mort Vuckerman is the chairman and editor of U.S. News and World Report.
He owns the New York Daily News.
The average length of unemployment is higher than it's been since government began tracking the data in 1948 is the subheadline of his piece.
Now we got Timmy Geithner out there saying, is it Geithner?
Who was it?
Somebody said we're going to have a jobless recovery.
Was it Geithner?
Was it Larry Summers?
Somebody said, I got it here somewhere.
How do you have a jobless recovery?
Oh, I get it.
Wall Street comes back.
Goldman Sachs is doing fine in a $3.4 billion profit.
Goldman Sachs is doing fine.
Wait till Americans find out about that.
They thought Goldman Sachs of Wall Street was going to be punished by Obama.
I mentioned a piece yesterday by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek magazine on the rich not being recession-proof this time.
And I read that again.
And the most important part of the article, the Samuelson piece yesterday, is a discussion on a Wall Street Journal article and the reaction thereto.
Now, here's from the Samuelson piece.
Quote, in April, the Wall Street Journal ran an article sympathetically portraying families with incomes around $250,000, the level that Obama has targeted for tax increases.
Sympathetic to those people.
By most measures, families at $250,000 rank in the top 2% to top 4% of the income spectrum.
But many and possibly most of those people see themselves as upper middle class and not rich, said the Wall Street Journal.
The wife of a surgeon who makes about $260,000 was quoted.
She said, I'm not after sympathy.
What I want is a reality check on what rich means.
I can pay my mortgage and I can buy some clothes.
I'm not going without, but I'm not living a life of luxury.
The mayor of San Jose, California, scoffed at $250,000.
That's what a two-engineer couple might make, he said.
It put them in the upper working class, but it wasn't enough to buy a home in Silicon Valley.
So how can you say you're rich if you can't buy a home in Silicon Valley?
And the article triggered, the journal piece triggered an outpouring of emails, many applauding that somebody had finally described their harried plight.
Others sarcastically wondered what planet the winers lived on.
How can you make $250,000 a year and be complaining about it?
But so much angst against among the affluent, however defined, attests to something else.
Samuelson, this is his point.
The present recession, unlike any other since World War II, has deeply shaken the nation's economic elite.
And that was the theme of his story, but I didn't mention to you his quoting in the Wall Street Journal piece in April that closes the loop.
Now, this illustrates very well why it is so dangerous to allow the government to pick and choose tax winners and tax losers.
If you make $10,000, you're okay taxing the rich guy making $25,000.
If you make $25,000, tax the rich guy making $50,000 because he doesn't need it all.
On and on and on and on.
Make $75,000, tax the guy making $100,000.
You make $250,000, you're getting soaked, and everybody wants you to get soaked.
There's another problem here.
43% of taxpayers now do not pay income tax.
They pay FICA, payroll, but they don't pay income tax.
Now, how can you have a representative republic when half, almost half of people do not pay taxes?
And when those people don't pay taxes, they understand who's supporting them.
So they favor tax increases on everybody else.
The natural human tendency, I mean, your average Democrat, is to think that anyone and everyone who makes more than you is just a selfish bastard if he complains about taxes.
Obama, politicians like Obama know this.
They deliberately twist and use that class envy reaction under the big lie of fairness to gain even more control of the economy and then use that control for their ends and best interests, not the nation's.
So this is why flat tax, fair tax works, this arbitrary setting of rates based on what Obama thinks is rich.
It leads to even further diversions and divisions in the country among the population.
Plus, it doesn't raise any money.
And this is the, you know, the fascinating thing, if you were listening yesterday and you heard me say and you didn't want to see, you don't want to listen and you don't want to believe me that Obama is purposely destroying the middle class, purposely destroying it, purposely raiding it, taking capital away from the private sector and transferring it to governments and unions and so forth.
If you don't want to believe that, if you just can't bring yourself to believe that anybody we would elect president would want to destroy, because you can't believe that somebody like Obama grew up hating America, being told it was unjust and immoral, now has a chance to fix it.
You just don't believe it, then ask yourself this.
We're running huge, as Jim Sasser in Tennessee used to say, deficits.
We got deficits coming out of every bodily orifice.
We got deficits coming out of the mouth of every river in this country.
We got deficits everywhere.
We've got $2.5 trillion budget deficit this year, $12 trillion forecast, and there's more spending to come.
Now, wouldn't you think that given that reality, one of the first things on the mind of people in Washington would be revenue generation?
And isn't that what you think taxes are for?
Yes, that's right, Mr. Limbaugh.
We are taxed.
This is the voice of the new Castrati.
That's right, Mr. Limbaugh.
We are taxed so that we citizens can do our civic duty and pay for all of the goods and services that our government generally provides for us.
Okay, you believe that.
You believe it's the purpose of taxes.
Raise money for the government to provide our roads and bridges and our schools and toasters or whatever the hell else.
Have you seen the decline in revenue being generated by virtue of taxes given the recession?
There are more and more people out of work.
More and more businesses are closing.
One of the reasons the deficits are so high is that there is far less tax revenue being produced.
It's just a simple matter of math.
So here we have the smartest people in the world, the Obamas and the Larry Summers and these guys, and their policies are creating less revenue.
Less revenue to run the country, to provide the goods and services that we the citizens need and crave.
And yet they're not bothered by it.
They continue with policies that will result in less revenue still being generated via taxes.
And what are they going to then do?
Raise taxes on the remaining people who pay them.
Oh, by the way, you make under 250 grand and they do this health care, you're going to get soaked like everybody else.
If you're one of the 43% not paying income tax, get ready.
You're going to get soaked with a value-added tax, a VAT tax.
You're going to have some kind of sales tax.
It's going to happen.
We're all going to pay higher taxes under the theory that that will raise more revenue.
It's going to reduce revenue because it's going to slow down the economy even further.
It's going to cause more people to lose their jobs.
We're going to have fewer taxpayers.
And when you have fewer taxpayers, you have less tax revenue.
Yet none of this bothers them.
They are prepared to fully implement every stage of this to create less revenue, more unemployment.
It can't be that they're just naive and mistaken.
And even after a year of this, there's talking a second stimulus now.
After the abject failure of the first, and the first stimulus, we've only spent 6% of it, and it's all gone to the states to help with their own budget deficits and to the unions.
We haven't even spent it.
They know it's not going to stimulate anything economically.
Now they're talking about a second one.
There is no other conclusion than there is an ongoing effort to remake the structure of this country from a free market capitalist system to a command and control government-run system for the express purpose of making sure that everybody's equal or as equal as they can make it, that nobody has any more than anybody else.
If they do, they'll tax that.
That's who these people are.
They have grown up.
They have been taught.
They have been raised that America is unjust and immoral.
Obama goes over there and says we've got to get rid of all missiles.
All these dropping bombs and firing missiles in Afghanistan.
This CIA program in New York.
The New York Times knew about this program, by the way, in 1992.
We found out.
They knew about this program.
They talked about it on Sunday.
They knew about it back in 1992.
It was a program designed to kill at close range, not with missiles or bombs, at close range al-Qaeda leaders in 2001, which makes total sense, right?
After 9-11, you want to go get those guys.
Everybody said, go get them.
Torah Borg, go get them.
The Democrats all like, well, you didn't get Obama.
You are Osama, so you failed.
And Leon Panetta's canceled the program.
Canceled the program while Obama is implementing it in Afghanistan.
We're dropping missiles.
We're going in trying to get these guys in close range.
Oh, another story in the stack of stuff.
You know what?
He may not be able to close Gitmo in January.
He just might not be able to do it.
It's Bush's fault.
What?
And Bush didn't tell him how fully intertwined Club Gitmo was with the war on terror and how there was nowhere else to put these prisoners because nobody else wanted them and so forth.
It's just like Biden said that we, you know, we were, what did he say?
We underestimated or misread how bad the economy was because Bush didn't tell us.
We didn't have the right figures.
Same thing with Gitmo.
That's my whole point.
They did know how bad it was.
We all knew how bad the economy was.
Everybody knew how bad it was.
They knew how bad the economy was.
This is all smoke and mirrors because they still want people to believe that Obama's oriented toward fixing it.
What they don't know is he is fixing it his way.
It's working.
His whole point is to go out there and convince people that it's coming.
The recovery and the rebound and your job, it's coming.
It would be even worse if we hadn't done the first stimulus.
I got to go.
Quick time out here.
We'll be back.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, with talent on loan from God.
Very strategic announcement by President Obama this morning during the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor.
President Obama at the White House after a meeting with the Dutch prime minister had some words, and nobody broke away from the hearings to cover this.
Well, not on the channel I was watching.
It was for two channels and I didn't see them break away from Soto Mayor.
They played video later after it happened during a break in the hearings for Sotomayor.
But here's President Obama.
Now, if you're going to make this announcement, what better time to do it than when the world is focused on a Supreme Court confirmation hearing?
My expectation is that we will probably continue to see unemployment tick up for several months.
And the challenge for this administration is to make sure that even as we are stabilizing the financial system, we understand that the most important thing in the economy is are people able to find good jobs that pay good wages.
Now, how's that hope and change working out for you?
This, folks, is outrageous.
The challenge, he tells us unemployment is going to tick up.
He could announce a couple things today that would not turn the job situation around immediately, but change attitudes immediately.
Eliminate corporate taxes or reduce them to 25%, whatever capital gains, personal tax cuts, any number of things.
And I tell you, Wall Street would go nuts, and so would the private sector.
But he makes he's got to stabilize the financial system first.
He says this here.
The challenge of this administration is to make sure that even as we're stabilizing the financial system, like coming up with more money to give people to pay their mortgage when they're out of work, that's going to stabilize the financial system.
We understand that the most important thing is are people able to find good jobs that pay good wages.
Now, be very careful here because he doesn't mean a word of that.
If he wanted circumstances or people to able to find work at good wages, he wouldn't be doing the policies he's doing.
Oops.
Thought I was finished.
I still have seven seconds to go.
So I'll say it again.
If he really wants to create jobs, he wouldn't be saying and doing what he's doing.
No mistakes.
Welcome back.
It's happy.
We are happy to have you with us, Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Politico today.
Obama's rosy scenario turns thorny.
This is by Gene Cummings, I believe.
President Obama's economic forecasts for long-term growth are too optimistic, many economists warn.
A miscalculation that would mean budget deficits will be much higher than the administration is now acknowledging.
Alternately, if Obama clings to current optimistic forecasts for long-term growth, he risks accusations that he's basing his fiscal plans on fictitious assumptions, precisely the sort of charge he once leveled against the Bush administration.
And on page two of this story is a Clinton administration, economic advisor, actually Robert Shapiro.
It's also dangerous and risky to forecast all this optimism because if the forecast doesn't come true, you've undermined the basis for the rest of your policies.
That's exactly why they're doing health care by August.
That's exactly why they're trying to do everything before it bombs out, and it's going to bomb.
They know it's going to bomb.
They want it to bomb.
They want to get this done before it bombs.
If you have ever trusted me on anything, trust me on this.
This is intentional.
The speed at which they are proceeding to get all this done is to get it done before it gets so bad, everybody has to acknowledge how bad it is and how wrong the plans to fix this have been.
Obama's first forecast after the stimulus bombed is what the politico says.
Economists say his long-term predictions are no better.
Forget growth.
They're saying, forget growth.
He's so wrong on deficits.
We're not going to have any growth by design.
If you have never trusted me before, trust me now, all of this is by design.
It has been pointed out to me, by the way, and this is a good point, that the Democrats, Biden and these guys, are saying the same thing about the economy.
They said about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
All of these Democrats, remember how eager they were to go in there and take out Saddam, Hillary, and all that bunch?
They believed 1998, we have the audio of all of them saying, Saddam's got these nuclear weapons, mass destruction weapons.
We got to go in there.
We got to get them out.
It's bad, bad, bad.
When Bush said so, they did same thing.
But then, when no weapons of mass destruction of significance were found, all of a sudden, what happened?
Well, Joe Wilson surfaced and that started this whole parade of Bush lied.
Bush lied to us.
And that's essentially what Biden's saying.
The same script when Biden says, we misread, we guessed wrong, we didn't know how bad it was.
They're saying they've been lied to again.
These poor old Democrats lied to again.
No, Obama didn't lie to him.
Bush did.
Bush lied to him about Gitmo.
Bush lied to him about Iraq weapons of mass destruction.
Bush lied to him about how bad the economy was.
So now the phrase is, Obama lied and the economy died.
Obama lied and the economy died.
Never mind.
Never mind that anybody can see the economic numbers just as we can see them and these people can see more economic numbers than we do.
They are members of Congress after all.
But we didn't know.
Bush lied.
We didn't know how bad it was.
Same tactic.
All right.
Now, Snerdley is asking me how long is it going to play.
Look, that's the question.
How long does any of Obama play?
We don't know.
How long does it play with his voters?
Now, the CBS poll, interestingly, that has Obama falling to 57%.
Let me find this.
If you dig into this, 57% in the same, that's his approval number, and that's down from 62, the CBS New York Times.
57% say that the country's on the wrong track.
He has lost six points in his approval numbers almost entirely from Democrats and independents.
And the poll says it's the economy that's hurting him.
So maybe the question's in the process of being asked or answered.
But as you heard, Harry Smith and Schieffer doing their best to cover it up, maybe even blame the poll a little bit.
Now, there's one thing about this poll I have to tell you that could mitigate it all.
Republican support for Obama has actually risen by a point.
It is Democrats and independents that account for his drop.
So I'm going to say Colin Powell proud, yeah, the Colin Powell Republican crowd loves the guy.
They probably call McCain.
I'm sure he said he approves.
And I'm sure Cole called Colin Powell.
I'm sure he said he approves of the way Obama's doing things.
But he's down six points or five points.
Independent.
Six points.
Six points from Democrats and Independents.
Okay, back to the phones.
We go to Cheshire, Connecticut.
John, thank you for holding and welcome to the EIB network.
Hey, Rush, second time Dittos from Cheshire.
Thank you.
Hey, Rush, you know, diving into this how long does it play issue and something you brought up early in the show with this $12 billion that he wants to spend now of money that we don't have on community colleges.
And, you know, part of my thought process is, you know, number one, we're not giving a basic education to our kids at the high school level.
So what's happening is community colleges are taking the place really of what kids used to get in high school.
You know, you are exactly right.
I don't want to offend anybody here, but of course I'm me and that's generally not possible for me to avoid is offending people.
But I happen to, over the last five or six years, have run into some people that were taking courses at a community college.
And I had them in junior high.
Yep.
And high school.
I had junior high and high school.
Whoa, what is it?
And then, but I've always wondered about this, why we need job retraining centers.
What the hell is school for in the first place?
Right.
I mean, there used to be a VoTech program that was out there that kids could take that wanted to do that sort of thing.
But along the lines of, you know, you ask how long does it play?
I mean, I see this as kind of, you know, again, another $12 billion of money that's coming to keep people in the system for another two years.
You know, we talk about the nursery school indoctrination where they want to start the kids earlier.
This is a way of keeping people in school for an extra two years and the brainwashing process can continue because if they're not out there actively seeking a job and maybe, you know, falling on their butts in terms of life, and they're sitting in a classroom for two years getting, you know, God knows what out of it in terms of the indoctrination.
And if they're losing their jobs and their health care is not portable and they're scared to death about losing their health care, they'll support healthcare.
It's like Marie Antoinette.
Now, she didn't actually say this.
Marie Antoinette has been crucified theoretically, philosophically, by history.
You know, the whole thing, Marie Antoinette, they don't have any bread.
Fine, let them eat cake.
In fact, when I first heard that, you know, I was a kid.
And I said, what's wrong with eating cake?
I'd much rather eat cake than bread.
Give me a good old-fashioned white cake, a yellow cake anytime over bunny bread or some of this store-bought processed.
No, no, no, the bread back in the cake back in those days was the scrapings from the oven.
I said, oh, okay.
But let's go along with historia.
Marie Antoinette, they don't have bread, let them eat cake.
Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, they don't have jobs.
Let them hear about universal health care.
That's the plan.
You're right on the money out there, John.
I appreciate it.
Charles in Jefferson City, Missouri.
Great to have you.
It's a state capital out there for those of you in Rio Linda.
Nice to have you with us.
Hello.
Yes, Texas-sized Dittos from a former resident of Hamler, Ohio.
Hey, I wanted to say something about Soto Mayor.
Years ago, I read your book, and of course, I've listened to you through the years, and one of the things I've learned from you is that liberals excuse themselves from the rules and laws that they put on others, and Soto Mayor is just like that.
She lies.
She gives a misrepresentation about what she really believes.
And, you know, that's typical.
It's not just a reflection of Obama.
It's a reflection of every other liberal.
It's a reflection of Leahy, of Reed, of Pelosi, of all these people.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
You have these people who don't dare publicly say what they really, even in her legal opinion in Ricci or in her testimony, don't say what you really believe because it's killer.
So you have to act.
This is one of the things that heartens me as I say, it also gives me pause at the same time because it still works, but it heartens me that these people still can't be upfront honest about who they are and what their plans are.
Interestingly enough, though, I will contradict myself.
Obama is.
Obama is doing exactly what he wrote in his books he was going to do.
Now, in his speeches, he is not out saying, I want to destroy the U.S. economy.
He is saying, I want to remake America.
And they mean the same thing, but he doesn't have the guts.
He doesn't have the guts to tell us the liberal, and they don't care what you think.
The more of you who disagree with them, the more contempt for you they have.
Democratic and liberalism cancel each other out.
They conflict.
Quick timeout.
We've got much more straight ahead.
To the phones, we continue.
Rapid City, South Dakota.
Tom, nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Hello, Rush.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
Mark did a wonderful job.
Appreciate knowing that.
I heard that from a lot of people.
I was going to ask you, Rush, about Judge Sotomayor.
Will anybody on the committee ask her about her affiliation with La Raza?
I guess she's been a member for like six years now.
I don't know if they will or not.
I could only hazard a guess.
And that is they won't.
Because they all want the Hispanic boat.
And that means they all want La Raza liking them.
So I don't think you're going to have anybody go there.
I think as far as they'll go.
I could be wrong.
Lindsey Gramnesty may shock us all.
Or in Hatch, I don't know.
We will just have to wait.
Speaking of Sodomine, let's go to some sound bites here, folks.
I've been delaying this.
Because here's Leahy.
And I mentioned at the top of the program, he's starting to sound more and more like Larry Flint.
Larry.
And I just constantly want to clear my throat when I'm listening to Leahy.
But here was his question to Soto Mayor on the controversy over the wise Latina comment.
During the course of this nomination, there have been some unfortunate comments, including outrageous charges of racism made about you on radio and television.
One person referred to you as being the equivalent of the head of the Kucos Klan.
Another leader in the other party referred to you as being a bigot.
You've heard all these charges and countercharges, the wise Latina, and on and on.
Here's your chance.
You tell us what's going on here, Judge.
And here is what she said.
My speech to a variety of different groups, most often to groups of women lawyers or to groups, most particularly of young Latino lawyers and students.
I was trying to inspire them to believe that their life experiences would enrich the legal system because different life experiences and backgrounds always do.
The context of the words have created a misunderstanding.
And to give everyone assurances, I want to state up front, unequivocally and without doubt, I do not believe that any ethnic, racial, or gender group has an advantage in sound judging.
Yes, sir.
I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge, regardless of their background or life experiences.
There was no way to take it out of context.
There was no way to take the wise Latina out of context.
She said she had hoped that a wise Latina, a Latina woman, would okay.
When she says, I want to state unequivocally without doubt, I don't believe that any ethnic, racial, gender group has an advantage in sound judging.
I do believe she thinks that.
I don't think she's talking about sound judging.
She's talking about empathy.
These people know what it's like to have a tough and hard and miserable life because of the majority in this country.
And they, because of the disadvantages and the discrimination that they have held, they are going to be able to make wiser rulings to help them.
That's what she believes.
It's not about sound judging.
It's about reversing power and using the law to do it from a flawed perception of who has power in the first place.
She's got this minority mindset.
And part of the minority mindset is you're always getting beat up.
You're always being discriminated against.
You're always being treated unfairly.
I'm going to fix it.
And everybody comes from that rich background of being untreated and fairly and discriminated against.
know how to get even.
That's what...
He's not talking about sound judging.
Then she rambled on here, blaming Sandra Day O'Connor for her words.
What the words that I used, I used agreeing with the sentiment that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was attempting to convey.
I understood that sentiment to be what I just spoke about, which is that both men and women were equally capable of being wise and fair judges.
Justices on the Supreme Court come to different conclusions.
It can't mean that one of them is unwise, despite the fact that some people think that.
So her literal words couldn't have meant what they said.
She had to have meant that she was talking about the equal value of the capacity to be fair and impartial.
Okay, so it was Sandra Day O'Connor's fault.
Sandra Day O'Connor could not have meant what she said.
Sandra Day O'Connor had to mean what I said.
Sandra Day O'Connor, probably playing golf in Arizona, finds out about this, going, Whoa, what do I do here?
Do I stay loyal to the women or do I chime in here?
She said she hoped that a wise man, a wise woman, come, you know, the same decision.
There is, you know, there is such a thing as wisdom, even though people come to different conclusions.
And not everybody who comes to a different conclusion is wise.
Some people come to wrong conclusions.
It doesn't mean they're wise.
Anyway, that's it.
Blame Sandra Day O'Connor.
Blame Sandra Day O'Connor.
She meant O'Connor meant what I said.
So take that, committee.
Take, take, take that.
Fastest three hours in media.
We are not just concluding the second hour.
We only have one more hour to go.
And I know most Americans are disappointed by that.
But you know, it's the old performer's creed: you always keep them wanting more.