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Nov. 19, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
November 19, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
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Snurdley, I can't believe how you spelled Muncie, Indiana.
We got a call from somebody in Muncie, Indiana, which is M-U-N-C-I-E, and Snerdley has spelled it M-O-U-N-S-E-Y.
Dr. Spencer sent me a note, Snerdley.
He thinks that you put Katie up on the board to pay me back for chiding you for being late today.
So now you're gonna have to give me another wacko after I've publicly admonished your lack of spelling correctness on Muncie Indiana.
Greetings, and uh welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Uh didn't have a chance to tell a broadcast engineer this.
Standby audio soundbite 17 and in order.
From there, whenever we get to it.
Now, unemployment.
Uh the idea, and this is responding to the uh the lovely and gracious Katie, uh, who uh in her obnoxiousness gave me the host in a five or six minute call, maybe thirty seconds, accused me of plagiarism of being idly rich, being unproductive.
Said I have enough idle money to waste it on a newspaper.
She said I have more money than God in Palm Beach or wherever I am.
Ever the hell I am, and uh she also uh uh well what was the it's on the tip of my tongue, one other allegation she made or accuse.
Well, it'll it'll come to me.
Oh, oh, her point, she was she called because she was she said she was outraged, she's driving around, she's just been fired, and she's working real hard to find another job, real real hard, and she heard me say that there are people who are not uh anymore looking for work, that they're totally happy with their unemployment benefits.
How could you possibly say that?
I don't believe you ever really believed that.
Of course, she preceded all this by saying she was a conservative.
Katie, you ought to see my email, the reviews on you.
Uh she's a stop snickering and laughing at me.
She's shouting at her radio now, wherever she is.
All right.
Unemployment.
The idea that there are people who want to work but can't find work is undeniable.
We've been talking about this for months.
I have been arguing for policies, folks, that would expand hiring.
I'm deeply troubled by what is happening to this country.
All the misery that's being created.
This is all happening by design.
This is on purpose.
It infuriates me.
Now that being said, there is no question that there are also people who are less likely to look for work if they can receive government benefits for months at a time.
Months at a time.
Let's think about this.
Why is it unreasonable to believe that there are some people who play the system?
We know this is true in all entitlement programs, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, yes, even unemployment.
People scam the system left and right.
The government itself just announced yesterday that they found 98 billion dollars of fraud in Medicare alone.
We know the fraud that goes on in the food stamp program.
Forty-nine million or 49%, what is it, 49 million or 49% of the American people are on food stamps.
Now the reason that Katie doesn't have a job might be because she's obnoxious.
It's entirely possible.
Human behavior is what it is.
If you subsidize more something, you're gonna get more of it.
If you destroy more of something, you get less of it.
If you're gonna subsidize people not to work, they're not gonna work.
It's just that simple.
Look at I have to be honest here, folks.
I don't know anybody who hasn't faced tough times at least once in their life.
That's the nature of life.
We in America have grown spoiled because we are the land of plenty.
We used to be the country of boundless opportunity, economic and otherwise.
We used to be a country where your dreams were your only limit.
But now dreams are more than likely just to be dreams.
If this administration keeps on doing what it's doing.
It's the nature of life to face tough times.
Everybody has to deal with unemployment or tough economic times.
You have to deal with the death of loved ones.
It's the nature of life.
It's not perfect.
As a society, we try to give a helping hand.
We all pay in unemployment insurance.
But to say that government programs are the only way out now.
And that nobody who uses them takes advantage of them, often to their own detriment, is to ignore human behavior and the facts.
You see, the truth of the matter is the left wants everyone subsidized in some way.
And the fight over national health care is just the greatest example.
They want us to have to rely on government for our well-being.
Now I want you to stop and think about something.
One tiny little computer glitch practically shut down the nation's air travel system.
There have been numerous cancellations.
Flights are delayed, other flights are grounded.
A computer glitch.
These people obviously did not back up the system on carbonite.
But beyond that, the government again, there are people stranded in airports.
A computer glitch that lasted a few seconds.
Look at all the chaos it's caused.
And yes, you know what's coming next.
These are the same people who are going to try to tell you when you can and can't have a mammogram or any other aspect of your health care.
The problem with all of this, Katie, all of this, unemployment, extension, all of it, yeah, we're a compassionate society, and yeah, times are tough, but the problem is it creates dependency.
It drains the individual of motivation.
See, I love people.
I love the individual.
I love the power of the individual to overcome whatever obstacles in life there are.
But if we disincentivize that kind of work, if we disincentivize the power of the individual, if we beat people down and tell them that the only way that they're going to have any kind of a life at all is to have some sort of subsidy from the government.
We're going to destroy what was the greatest country on earth, and we're going to destroy the greatest economic pie, the greatest sense of opportunity, freedom, the liberty that any in the world have ever known.
And that is what distresses me so much.
I love people.
I want the best for everybody.
This life has treated me wonderfully.
Life I've been blessed with, this country has made things possible for me and for everybody else that's lived here unknown to other people.
I want to do much more than buy a newspaper in a failing business.
I want to try to reinstill in people a sense of self-worth.
The old can-do American spirit.
We're nearing one of these times where I predict soon that at the top of the bestseller list are going to be books on the power of positive thinking.
Thank you.
We don't need to read a book to learn how to fail.
We all know how to do that.
But look at the success books there are and how they sell, how to succeed at this, how to succeed at that.
Because that's hard.
It takes individual effort and help from other people.
But it still requires individual effort.
But there must be some motivation for that effort.
There has to be some reason for it.
And if that reason, if that spark, that spirit is being flushed out of people, if it's being put out, like a fire, which it is, then the very thing this country will need to come out of this recession is being destroyed.
And that is individual Ambition, motivation, desire, inspiration, ambition, dreams.
Without that, we're not going to come out of this.
And those things are under assault, a daily assault surrounding chaos.
The swine flu's gonna kill us, the earth is gonna die.
We're killing ourselves with global warming, which is a hoax.
The swine flu's out there, other diseases are forming right before our very eyes.
If you eat the wrong thing, you're going to die.
If you go to the wrong hospital, you're gonna die.
If you don't get that test, you're gonna die.
If you get in that car, you're gonna die, or you're gonna kill somebody.
Everything in the news today is about destroying the human spirit and creating dependency out of woefulness and hopelessness.
And the irony is that everybody elected somebody they thought was instilling hope in everybody.
Hopelessness is the result of Barack Obama, despair, tumult, chaos by design.
We even have news stories, such as in the Los Angeles Times on fun employment.
It is about people who have found fun, Katie, being unemployed.
There have been numerous stories about the unemployment circumstances, and this is all in support of Obama, by the way.
Unemployment's not bad.
Why people are learning basic values again.
They're learning to share.
They're learning to do with less.
They're learning thrift.
They're learning to save.
There was a story out of Seattle that the people who got laid off by Boeing were much happier than the people who weren't, that you were better off to have been fired than to still have your job at Boeing because it's so bad.
There have been stories about how the homeless, numbers of whom are on the rise, by the way, are actually in some cases happier than people who are working.
Don't tell me that there is not a move on to convince people to stop trying.
And it just breaks my heart.
We are a compassionate society.
I understand people are facing very tough times, but I also know how we get out of it.
And I also understand what Obama and the left are doing.
They are not only trying to transform our society, my friends, they are trying to transform the people from earnest, positive, innovative people to dependent, compliant servants.
They want you believing that your only hope is the government.
They want you turning to the government for more and more.
It is their desire to perpetuate their power in perpetuity forever.
Because the more people that depend on Obama personally or the government for the basics of life, the more people that will continue to vote for those people.
Out of fear, those basics will not be provided by different people, a different party.
When you extend unemployment benefits to more than 52 weeks, more than one year, and they're talking about over 70 weeks now, total unemployment compensation, you are subsidizing a certain percentage of non-activity.
That is people who are not going to as actively seek work or create businesses as they might otherwise do.
Katie had one thing right.
One thing.
What do you do when you have no money?
When you have no money, you scrounge for it, you take any job you can, you move, you go wherever.
But if there's just enough in the form of unemployment and in food stamps and whatever other program somebody can glom on to, if there's enough total there to allow a subsistence, after a while, human nature kicks in.
Remember all the stories we've had over the years, folks?
There was a business off the coast of North Carolina that took people out to feed some kind of exotic fish.
Maybe I don't know what's out there.
and the fish, whatever it was, after not too long a time became totally dependent on those tourist boats coming out and dropping a chum overboard.
They stopped learning how to feed for themselves because it wasn't necessary.
Mammal nature, human nature, whatever, it's what it is.
Yeah, what we're doing by extending unemployment compensation, and what we're doing by killing the job market is destroying the spirit of the United States of America, and it's happening on purpose.
I'm not saying people don't need help, and I don't want to be misunderstood about this.
Remember, we conservatives count and define compassion by the number of people who no longer need this kind of assistance.
Our objective is to get them off of it.
That's real compassion.
Self-reliance.
There's nothing more optimistic and more fulfilling than that.
And yet self-reliance is a concept that's even smeared and looked down upon.
Self-reliance, why, that's easy for you to say.
There is no denying none that these programs are being used by Obama and the Democrats to advance an agenda in lieu of cutting taxes and regulations to create real jobs, real wealth.
There's no denying there are recipients who take advantage of these programs.
There's no denying there is a media that is facilitating all this by writing stories about the glory and the virtue of being unemployed.
The only crooks in this society are not those who have jobs and run businesses.
Some crooks live off of government.
Some crooks are in government.
But our media wants you to believe that the only crooks where coats and ties go to work in big tall buildings, work at big corporations or small businesses, in other words, the boss.
They're the only crooks.
Wrong all, folks.
There are crooks on the streets, there are crooks in government, there are crooks in our Congress.
There are crooks in every state capital.
And there are crooks scamming government programs.
Back after this.
And welcome back, Rush Limbaugh.
As always, talent on loan from God.
All right, to the phones, we go to Muncie, or maybe I should say Mouncy, Indiana, as it's spelled up there for me.
Hi, Deborah.
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Rush.
What a pleasure to be able to talk to you today.
I just want to make sure you do live in Muncie, right?
I do.
And it is M U N C I E. Yeah.
Yeah, that's where I'm at.
Um been listening to the program.
Wow, what a great, great response to Miss Katie.
And I and I know I need to stay focused, but I wonder if you have some idle money laying around to help pay for the health care.
Because we're all gonna need a little of that.
Um too bad for Katie losing her job, but I agree with your rash, and it's and it really grieves my heart to even have to say those words that I do believe that we are creating uh a lot of misfortune fortune for people for the government wanting to control every aspect of our lives.
No question about it.
No question at all.
But you know, isn't Obama gonna have a uh health care summit?
Oh me, me, that really wasn't about creating jobs, I guess.
But um, he's gonna have a job summit, but job creation is not on the agenda.
Right.
Isn't it maybe about a secular second stimulus, possibly?
Maybe that's it.
I don't know.
But anyway, um my comment today was on Harry Reid's health care bill.
Um I believe he came out with a figure that the CBO said that the cost of that bill was going to be eight hundred and fifty billion dollars.
849, 849 billion.
Mm-hmm.
But I don't think that we factored in the fact that we're going to be paying um what is it?
There's a half a trillion dollar cut uh Medicare, if we really believe that figure.
let me give you the real number.
Let me give it a real number on this, Deborah, because it's even worse.
The way this is working, the same thing they did in the House.
They do a 10-year projection.
However, the tax increases that fund it start immediately.
The health care bill doesn't get implemented until year three or four.
And that's how they're able to bring in this phony price.
It is also phony because the the numbers are just targets.
The real number in this bill, and I'll I'll spell it out for you when we come back from the break, is 2.5 trillion.
2.5 trillion.
It's over 2,000 pages.
It would take 34 hours to read this bill from start to finish.
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma wants to make that happen.
Read it on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Thanks, Deborah.
We'll be right back, folks.
Don't go away.
Great to have you back, folks.
Rush Limbaugh with half my brain tight behind my back, just to make it fair.
Okay, the Harry Reed Healthcare Bill announced recently, late yesterday afternoon.
In fact, let's listen to him announce it.
It was uh late yesterday afternoon and on Capitol Hill at a little press conference.
We've traveled really a long ways to where we are.
And tonight begins the last leg of this journey that we've been on now for some time.
The American people, President Obama, have asked us for health insurance reform.
It does two things.
What?
One makes it more affordable for the American people.
We're not going to add a dime to deficit.
This is quite the opposite.
We'll cut the problems we have with money around here by as much as three quarters of a trillion dollars.
And this bill is going to do good things over the next ten years for so many different people in our society.
None of that's true.
The American people are not asking for this.
It's toward the bottom of the list of things they think are important.
Employment, the economy is at the top of the list right now.
It's not going to be deficit neutral.
It is i i it th there's not a word he said that's true here.
Not one.
Now, John Boehner has put out a uh statement here on the GOP leader blog, and he has found in Senator Reed's health care bill a requirement for a monthly abortion fee.
Nancy Pelosi, by the way, says she likes the abortion language in the Senate bill.
Just like the original 2032-page government-run health care plan from Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reed's 2074-page bill would levy a new abortion premium fee on Americans in the government-run plan.
Begin at beginning on line seven, page one eighteen, section thirteen oh three, under voluntary choice of coverage of abortion services.
Listen to this.
The Health and Human Services Secretary is given the authority to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run health plan.
That is Kathleen Sebelius at this time.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services is given the authority to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run health plan.
Leader Reid's plan also requires that at least one insurance plan offered in the exchange covers abortions.
Line 13, page 120.
What is even more alarming is that a monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run health plan.
It's right there, beginning on line 11, page 122, section 1303.
Under actuarial value of optional service coverage, the premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account, and these federal funds will be used to pay for abortion services.
You will be required to pay a monthly abortion premium.
It'll go into a Treasury account, and that's where the money will come from for government-run and paid-for abortions.
Section 1303 A2C describes the process in which the health benefits commissioner is to assess the monthly premiums that'll be used to pay for elective abortions under the government run health plan, and for those who are given an affordability credit to purchase insurance coverage that includes abortion through the exchange, the commissioner must charge at a minimum one dollar per enrollee per month.
Now remember, over on the House side, they have the Stupak Amendment, which says there will not be federally funded abortions.
This sets up, at least on paper, this sets up quite a fight to figure this out.
Because in the minds of some wizards of Smart, it can't pass with abortion funding in it, and it can't pass without it in it.
So we are going to see where this all goes.
Yuval Levin, National Review, the Corner Blog, uh has a pretty good description of the roughly 2,000-page bill.
Now, here we go again.
The 10-year projection scores its cost at $848 billion, because the CBO is required to use a 10-year window that starts at enactment.
The bill is designed to start collecting taxes well before it starts spending money.
So if you look at the first ten years of actual implementation, when both the spending and the taxes are in effect, in other words, ignore the first three years, where only tax increases go into effect, but there's no implementation of the bill.
You start three years later, when both the spending begins and the tax increases begin, and the 10-year cost then becomes 2.5 trillion.
Now the Democrats are proudly pointing to the fact that even with its high cost, the CBO says the bill will not increase the deficit in the first ten years.
But what that actually means is that in the midst of an economic downturn, it raises taxes.
It also cuts Medicare for the elderly, that's in this bill, too.
Enough to cover the gargantuan cost.
In fact, it raises taxes by almost half a trillion dollars over ten years.
And this includes taxes on employers, on the uninsured themselves, and on drugs and medical devices and more.
5% tax on elective cosmetic surgery.
5% tax on Botox, for example.
It cuts Medicare by nearly as much as it raises taxes.
And of course, the deficit neutrality calculation assumes things that'll never happen, which as usual, the CBO does its best to signal to readers of its analysis of the bill, even if it can't say it outright.
It's based, for instance, on the bill's claim that some key Medicare physician payments would be cut by 23% in 2011 and would not be restored, which will happen well after health freeze is over.
As the CBO carefully puts it, the legislation would put into effect a number of procedures that might be difficult to maintain over a long period of time.
The way to translate that is the legislation will have a bunch of garbage in it.
That'll never happen.
And the long-term budgetary impact could be quite different if key provisions of the bill were ultimately changed or not fully implemented, they say.
Yes, that's that's what Levin means when he says they're trying to tell us the truth here, but they've got to do it in a neutral sort of way because they're supposedly nonpartisan entity.
What this is is Washington speak for someone's holding a gun to my head.
Meanwhile, the bill would do basically nothing to address the actual problem at the heart of our health care woes, and that's rising costs.
Now, folks, here's a key number for you.
Let's use Reed's number, 848 billion.
It says that that will insure 31 million people who are uninsured.
But now remember the number used to be 47.
Who are they?
Well, that's the illegal immigrants who are covered on the house side.
But spending 848, 849 billion dollars to reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 31 million seems like a pretty expensive policy to me.
And then when you add in all the muck up it is going to cause in the actual health care system.
And I want to remind you again from Boehner's blog post.
Kathleen Sebelius will have sole authority to determine when abortions are paid for.
Fresh from her star turn on vaccines and breast cancer recommendations.
Oh yeah, she's showing us her brilliance, is she not?
The swine flu vaccine.
Oh, yeah, we got that handle.
We got well uh we need a reset on that.
And uh mammograms, yep, fifty years of age before you can get one.
She decides about federal money spent on abortion services.
And if she says it, then it is so.
It is a disaster waiting to happen.
Right there in front of us.
Uh let me take quick time out here because there's another there's a quick analogy I want to give it before I go to the break.
Now, let me get the break here first, otherwise the next couple segments are gonna be real short.
So we'll take a break now.
We'll come back right after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, we are back.
There's a piece of the Wall Street Journal uh yesterday by the dean of the Harvard Medical School.
And in my way of thinking, it may be the clearest, most apolitical expose and indictment of the whole health care reform issue.
It is uh said I basically says that there are three issues to reform.
The dean of the Harvard Medical School, by the way, Dr. Jeffrey Flyer, it's in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
Health debate deserves failing grade.
This is it is.
It's a it's a plain talk, apolitical, dispassionate analysis of so-called health care reform and how apolitically dishonest it is.
There are three issues to reform.
One cost, number two, access, number three, quality.
His is an apolitical conclusion.
None of the plans out there reduce cost, they increase costs.
None of the plans improve quality.
All of the plans increase access.
More people will be insured.
At what cost?
They will not tell us.
They know this reform will require urgent reform in the future, in the dean's own words.
They quietly understand this can only be the first step of a multi-year process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America.
The word drastically is his word, not mine.
So they know and are not telling us that they're gonna have to reform this immediately after they pass it.
Let me uh let me give you an illustration.
What they're asking us to do is board a ship to who knows where.
The cost of the trip will be who knows what.
And it's a one-way ticket.
We don't get back.
So we don't know where we're going.
We don't know what it's gonna cost us, but when we get there, we're stuck.
That's the best way to understand what this is all about.
A one-way ship to who knows where at a price tag we can't possibly contemplate, and we're forced to be on this ship.
And wherever it ends up, we're stuck.
We can't get back.
That is what awaits us.
This is hilarious.
This is from Der Spiegel.
Climatologists, baffled by global warming time out.
Right on the heels of Gore's latest fraudulent.
By the way, I wonder if the AP is going to assign eleven crackerjack reporters to fact-check Al Gore's latest book, as they fact-checked Sarah Palin's book.
Global warming appears to have stalled.
Climatologists are puzzled as to why.
Average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last ten years.
Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.
In other words, folks, they don't know crap.
None of their computer models predicted this, did it?
Their computer models all said, oh no, we're all gonna boil.
And now there's been a ten-year timeout.
And they don't know why.
They are baffled.
The weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating.
The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December when the city will host the climate change conference will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment.
The uh Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium.
It even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming World Summit in the Danish Capitol, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders, environmental activists, all of whom are probably crooks to one degree or another.
Plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiation.
Yes.
Billions of Euros are at stake, meaning who is going to get what from the slush fund that has been created ostensibly for cap and trade and to stop global warming.
They're all a bunch of crooks.
No, I mean they're Spiegel, they're disappointed.
This is not good news.
It's not good news to the crooks.
Billions of Euros hang in the balance.
All right to the phones.
Courtney in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Hi.
How are you doing, Russ?
Very good, thank you.
Listen, I had to call.
Uh I've been listening to you.
I'm a first-time caller, but I've been listening to you for years.
I even watched you on television years and years ago.
Thank you, my brother.
Now, this lady that called you, I mean, that made me so upset that I didn't know what to do.
I'm not a Republican, I'm not a conservative, I'm a registered Democrat, but I I I vote for whoever is addressing my issues.
I might vote for a Republican, a Democrat, uh uh a uh libertarian.
It depends on if they're addressing mine.
But that lady, I believe she only called you.
She was making an excuse for what you said to call you to show how jealous and envious she was of your success.
That's all it was.
You think that's what it was?
I I know it was.
That lady was arrogant, obnoxious, as you said, and she's a sicko fan.
It's a shame.
I mean, she's just jealous of every everything that you have.
Look look at what she said to you.
You got money you got more money than God, and this and that, and blah, blah, blah.
And she won't even move to find a job.
Well, I think it was just envy and jealousy.
I really do.
And I and Russ, I'm telling you, I don't agree with almost anything you say, really.
I I agree with some things.
But now I got an ally.
Because the woman was so obnoxious and envious.
Russ, I'm telling you, uh, I I'm happy for you.
I I hope you get double or triple the money you're making.
I'm a capitalist, I'm an entrepreneur.
Uh, it's just views that I don't deal with, but that upset me.
I said, Look, I've never called the show, but I got a call now.
So the best of luck to you.
That lady needs to go sit down and look at herself and look in the mirror.
You know, I I uh well, that may be well, never mind.
Um I really believe that I believe I've caught myself on that.
You know, I look at you have a you have a great point, Courtney, and I I uh you know, I I am fully aware that many, many people would love to be me, but I did not think she was one of them when I was talking to her.
She she now she would like to be you too, but she's jealous and envious.
That's all it is.
She's jealous of your intelligence, she's jealous.
She was kind of snarky, palm beach or wherever the hell you are.
She was terrible.
She was terrible.
You might be from Philadelphia because you got a lot of those snotty people like that here, too.
Expect especially the fired reporters.
And you know the inquiry to Daily News here in Philadelphia is up, you know, for sale.
They're going up for auction.
Yeah, I am well aware.
So you told her, right.
Why would you invest in uh in a failing business like that?
You know, something going on.
What are you what do you do for a living?
I got twenty.
I'm retired.
I work for uh ATT for 35 years.
I retired in 1999.
I'm 66 years old.
Well, so you're clipping coupons.
Uh oh, very much so.
Right.
Which is something she won't do.
She won't do that.
She's too good for that.
Exactly.
All right.
No, no, I didn't mean those kind of coupons.
I meant mutual bond coupons.
We'll be back for I didn't mean the store coup.
I normally would not even mention this.
Senator John Kerry, who served in Vietnam's daughter, arrested for DUI in LA.
I normally wouldn't mention this, folks, and I'm not going to make a big deal out of it now, but I will say this.
I wonder if AP will assign an army of reporters looking into this, because you know that if this were Sarah Palin's child, who had been stopped for DUI, more than 11 reporters would be looking into it,
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