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Dec. 17, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:09
December 17, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
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It is the fastest three hours in media, and I'm the host of the fastest three hours in media, Rush Limbaugh, and we're here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
A telephone number if you want to join us, 800-282-2882, and the email address, LRushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
Now, the Wall Street Journal has a story here today on their latest poll with NBC.
And the headline of the story, Democrats' blues grow deeper in new poll.
Now, before I get into this, I want to explain something that is quite fascinating.
61%, that's the average, 61% of the American people oppose Obama's health care plan.
And Joe Axel's, David Axelrod says they're wrong.
There's all kinds of protections for patients in this that we've been fighting for for decades.
And we're in a really savage insurance company.
We're in a lower premium.
Everybody's wrong about this.
I oppose this.
And I'm wrong about it.
And now even the left, the Kook fringe base, opposes it.
And they're wrong.
Everybody's wrong about this except Obama and Axelrod.
Take it back.
They do have their media allies who are 150% on board with this.
But everybody's wrong.
Everybody misunderstands.
If this, if this were the great healthcare reform that a lot of people in this country do want, I happen to think they'd be all for it if it actually did just the two things that people are worried about.
Lower costs, expand access.
But everybody knows now, except the media, that it doesn't do this.
And the media doesn't really care what's in it.
All they care about, how's it going to end for Obama?
How's it going to end?
Is Obama going to get his health bill?
Is Obama going to win at Copenhagen?
Is Obama going to strike a deal at Copenhagen?
They don't care about any damn thing else other than this little man-child getting gold stars for his work.
They're propagandists and repeaters.
They don't report diddly squat.
Less than a year after Inauguration Day, support for the Democrat Party continues to slump amid a difficult economy and a wave of public discontent, according to a new Wall Street Journal NBC poll.
The findings underscore how dramatically the political landscape has changed during the Obama administration's first year.
In January, despite the recession and the financial crisis, voters expressed optimism about the future.
The new president, the new young president, the new clean and articulate young president, enjoyed soaring approval ratings, and congressional leaders promised to swiftly pass his ambitious agenda.
In December's survey, for the first time, less than half of Americans approved of the job the president's doing, marking a steeper first-year freefall for his president than his predecessors.
Also, for the first time this year, the electorate was split when asked which party they wanted to see in charge after 2010.
For months, a clear plurality favored Democrat control.
The survey suggests that public discontent with Obama and his party is being driven by an unusually grim view of the country's status and future prospects.
A majority of Americans believe that the U.S. is in decline.
And that's gut-wrenching because there's no excuse for that.
This country ought not ever be in decline.
But let me tell you something.
The people running this country now think it should be.
That we have been unfairly prosperous.
that we have, you heard the old stat, we have 2% to 3% of the world's oil and we use 35% of it.
We have whatever small percentage of the world's population and we use whatever percentage of the world's resources.
We suck.
We are greedy.
We are selfish.
We are arrogant.
And by God, it's about time somebody slapped us upside the head and taught us a lesson.
Because a lot of people, everybody at Copenhagen wants us in decline.
They want us destroyed.
Everybody in every leftist movement has as their real purpose, whatever the movement is, the destruction of the United States.
That's not new.
What is new is that we have leaders in the Democrat Party who share, to a certain extent, that sentiment, that this is a guilty country.
Democrat problems seem in part linked to their ambitious health care plan billed as a signature achievement for Obama.
Now for the first time, more people said they would prefer Congress did nothing on health care than people who wanted to see the overhaul enacted.
Now Obama just went out.
He's praising Pelosi for passing the new jobs bill.
What is it, $155 billion new spending for jobs bill?
You know, his statement was, there are some who say we need to take no action, but I say we must take.
Nobody's saying don't take any action.
What we're saying is take the right action.
Cut some taxes.
Provide incentives.
Get out of people's way.
Stop thinking you're the Messiah.
Stop thinking you're the savior.
Now people, and Obama said, some say the status quo is fine.
I say we need action on health care.
Now people are saying don't do anything if you're going to do this.
Stop.
Do nothing if the alternative is what you plan.
Republican pollster Bill McInturf said for Democrats, the red flags are flying at full mast.
Sorry, that was Democrat pollster Peter Hart.
What we don't know for certain is have we reached a bottoming out point?
The biggest worry for Democrats is that the findings could set the stage for gains by Republican candidates next year.
But public displeasure with Democrats wasn't translating directly into warmth for Republicans.
28% of voters expressed positive feelings about the GOP.
That's a number that has remained constant through the Democrats' decline over the summer and the fall.
Only 5% said their feelings toward the Republicans were very positive.
Oh, let's stipulate that that's true for a second.
We know that the independents are fleeing the Democrat Party in droves over health care and a number of other things.
Imagine, imagine how much more movement there would be away from the Democrats if there was something those people could move to rather than move away from.
The opportunity to contrast who we are with them and what they're doing has never, ever been better.
I'm telling you, I'm pretty sure that the fear among elected officials in the Republican Party is the president's race.
Any criticism, they're going to accuse the Republicans of being racist and that they just don't want to put up with.
So I think they're content to let the president implode and try to pick up the pieces without participating too much in the implosion.
They could enhance the implosion.
They could hasten the implosion.
They could deepen it.
A majority for the first time also disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy and the public's personal affection for the president.
A consistent strong suit has begun to fray.
50% now feel positive about him, six points lower than in October and 18 points less since his early weeks in orifice.
Democrat troubles can be attributed in part to changing feelings among some core supporters, too.
A third of voters, 34 and under, a group that turned out heavily for Democrats last year, feel negative toward the Democrat Party.
Just 38% of Hispanics feel positive, which is down from 60% in February.
Now, for all the Democrat challenges, they can be thankful they don't have to try to reverse America's feelings about Tiger Woods.
You see the trick here?
The trick is, be it economic reporting or this, you spell out the bad news.
It's rotten.
It's horrible.
But it's not as bad as it could be if the president were Tiger Woods.
For all the Democrats' challenges, they can be thankful they don't have to try to reverse Americans' feelings about Tiger in the wake of revelations about his affairs.
Just 5% feel positive about Tiger Woods in the NBC Wall Street Journal poll.
Just 5%, ladies and gentlemen, that is quite a plunge.
How many of you only give flowers at the appointed time during the year?
Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, birthdays.
Have you ever thought about giving flowers?
I've always scored big points when I give flowers at the most unexpected time of the year, just to give them.
Not because there's some tradition or holiday or standard that dictates they be given.
Christmas time is an opportunity to say something different with flowers.
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I have been asked to expand on my explanation of last hour of why the banks are not lending to the private sector, but they are lending to the government.
It's not hard to understand.
It's very simple, but its complexity is what makes it simple.
And it requires some baseline understanding of how the whole process is working here.
The problem is this.
The banks first claimed that they were going under and they needed TARP money.
So they were required to take $25 million each or billion dollars each.
Some even didn't need it, like Wells Fargo.
Now the banks are starting to pay some of the money back.
And people say, where are they getting the money to pay it back?
Where are the banks getting the money to pay back?
If they have the money to pay it back, then why do they need it in the first place?
Nothing's changed in the years since they took the money.
So what's changed?
Well, I'll tell you what's changed.
Interest rates from the Federal Reserve to banks are near zero.
They're not near zero for you than a mortgage or at a credit card, but the interest rate that exists between the Fed and the banks is zero, or pretty much.
So the banks can get free money by lending to the government.
Now, the government has to borrow from someplace.
What the simple explanation is, is that the government is borrowing money for the banks.
There's zero interest on that.
In exchange for it, they're buying treasury bonds.
That's how you borrow or lend to the government.
Those bonds are a guaranteed 3% return.
It's that simple.
If you can lend to somebody that's guaranteed to pay you back 3%, as opposed to lending to somebody risky out in the private sector who may not even be able to collateralize the loan, why would you do it?
You got in trouble doing it once on the subprime mortgage business, and you were forced to do that if you're a bank.
So if Obama really wants the banks to start lending to people in the private sector, the simple answer is to stop giving banks unlimited amounts of money for essentially free.
Now, let's say, as an example, let's say a bank lends the government a million dollars by buying a treasury bond.
Now, the bank's wealth has not gone up a million dollars, but there is a guaranteed 3% return on the loan being paid back.
If the Federal Reserve would make a change and raise interest rates to where the banks were not able to get essentially free money from the government, then you might have somebody at a bank interested in loaning some money to somebody other than the government.
But as long as the interest rate from Fed to bank is pretty much zero and you get a 3% return on it, why screw with that?
And so, again, the answer, when Obama goes up and calls the bankers in and wails and moans and everybody else is wailing and moaning, I can't get a loan.
Nobody will borrow me, lend me any money.
Again, the answer is Obama.
The answer is Obama and the Federal Reserve and free money.
Stop giving the banks unlimited amounts of money for free in the form of interest-free loans at a guaranteed 3%.
And bamo, the way you would do this would be to raise short-term rates for government money to 3%, exactly what the return is now, so that the banks zero out.
If it costs them 3% to borrow it or to lend it, and they're only going to get 3% back when the government pays it back, then they zero out.
They'll look for other places because nobody lends money without wanting to make money on it unless it was the subprime thing, which again was the federal government.
So the bottom line with all of this is the reason you can't loan money or borrow money, the reason it's tough to, is because of your government's policy.
And all the while this is being done, guess who Obama continues to beat up?
Fat cats on Wall Street.
Most of whom voted for him.
None of this is complicated.
Once you understand the underlying baselines of what's going on, none of it's hard to understand, but I can make it simple for you.
You just have to trust me and you have to trust yourself.
If you want to understand why problems exist in the country today, if you have questions about it, your first answer should always be, it's got to be something the government's doing that's screwing me up because it is.
I'm going to ask these questions again.
How many people had health care when Barack Obama became president and how many lost their health care since he became president?
Because they lost their jobs.
What is that number?
How many people had homes when Obama became president and how many have homes today?
How many people had homes that were worth something when Obama became president?
And how many of those people's homes are now underwater since he became president?
How many jobs, how many people had jobs when Obama became president, and how many have jobs today?
How many had savings accounts with actual money in the savings accounts when Obama became president?
And how many people have savings accounts with money in them today?
The answer to the disaster that is Obama and his policies is not to expand his policies even more.
The answer is to change course.
The answer to understanding what's going wrong is Obama and the Democrats in the House and the Senate.
That is what is going wrong.
Who they are ideologically matters.
It's not hard to figure out who they are.
You just have to believe it.
And once you understand that liberals do things as you're seeing them do now, you also have to come to the conclusion that liberals lie because they never told you this was going to be the result of what they said.
In fact, they said it was going to be the opposite.
Unemployment would never get higher than 8%.
The financial system would be saved.
Small business would be able to borrow money.
Roads and bridges were going to be repaired.
Schools were going to be repaired.
Instead, now, none of that's happened, but the solution to all that is to go caulk your windows.
So it's very simple.
It just takes courage to admit what you see.
And a lot of people don't want to get ideological.
A lot of people think being ideological is closed-minded.
No, no, no, no.
Being ideological is the epitome of being informed.
Being ideological, understanding what a Marxist is, understanding what a liberal is, understanding what a socialist and fascist is.
If you understand those things, you understand the modern-day Democrat Party.
We're not saying it's what JFK was.
We're not saying it's what LBJ was, although you can probably peg the beginning of all this to LBJ.
And we get to Jimmy Carter, and we doubled down.
And now we've got Jimmy Carter on steroids.
Except Carter, he was just a bumbling, doddering old idiot.
This is being systematically done on purpose by the so-called progressives.
Let me tell you something.
Hugo Chavez, thunderous applause when he attacks capitalism at the climate change conference in Copenhagen, thunderous applause.
You can read various chapters in Barack Obama's book and find that he has the same view of capitalism.
His first job was as some minion, I think, in a law firm somewhere or some other publication.
And he writes of sitting in his cubicle in this private sector business, feeling like he was sitting in enemy lines.
He'd crossed enemy lines.
There's no difference in liberals wherever they are.
There's no difference in Marxists wherever they are.
There's no difference in socialists wherever they are.
They all hate capitalism.
And that means they have to have a degree of dislike for the largest capitalist country in the history of human civilization, us.
One of the weirdest stories that I have seen in a long time is out of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
A four-year-old boy, beer in hand, is accused of stealing Christmas presents from his neighbors.
It's a strange story.
April Wright is 21 years old.
She's going through a divorce with her husband, who is in jail.
She says that she's not sure how her four-year-old managed to get out of the house, open a beer, and steal the neighbor's presents from under their tree.
Now she's just glad that he's okay and says that she won't let it happen again.
The child, Hayden Wright, was found around 1.45 Tuesday morning wandering the streets of his neighborhood.
He's four.
In police reports, officers said he was wearing a little girl's dress and drinking a beer.
The police report says the child had to be taken to hospital to be treated for alcohol consumption.
April Wright, the 21-year-old mother, said the biggest concern was him being out there getting kidnapped, getting run over, the alcohol, having to have his stomach pumped.
Wright says that she woke up that night at 1.45 and panicked when she found that Hayden was gone.
She says she put safety devices in all the doors so kids couldn't get out, but Hayden was able to break the safety device off the doorknob and get outside.
He's four.
Once outside, April Wright said her four-year-old followed his father's footsteps and was found on Blue Spruce Road drinking.
He runs away trying to find his father.
He wants to get in trouble so he can go to jail because that's where his daddy is.
The Hamilton County Sheriff's Office report says that Hayden Wright, four years old, rang the doorbell a few houses down.
The neighbor answered, finding the child holding a beer can, 12-ounce beer can, partially consumed.
Wright said he got it out of my father's cooler in the back, and now he got it open.
I don't understand because it was one of those tab beers.
But it doesn't stop there.
The report said that Hayden then snuck into a neighbor's house through an unlocked front door and stole five wrapped Christmas presents.
One was a girl's brown dress, which Hayden was wearing when police found him.
Going to the neighbor's house and taking their presents, that's very embarrassing, says his mother.
She admits that she was not just embarrassed, but scared and rushed to the hospital that night with Hayden.
She said she tries to be a good mother and loves her son, but now feels like a failure.
Kids do things like this and it's out of your control.
You can do the best you can as a mother, but sometimes it's not enough.
I don't know.
I read a story like this and I just have questions.
One of the questions I would have, you wake up at 1.45 and your first thought is to make sure the kids are all there.
Why?
Have they been missing at 1.45 before?
Now, I'm not a parent, so I don't know what you do at 1.45 when you wake up.
Maybe people do tiptoe around the house, check on the kids, make sure they're okay.
I guess that's possible.
Probably likely.
But the rest of the story is just unbelievable.
Who's got their house unlocked, their front door unlocked?
He steals Christmas presents.
He's drinking a brewski.
That he opened.
Well, I don't understand what's so tough about that.
A tab con most four-year-olds' fingers can't manage to open a tab top beer can.
The dexterity is not developed.
Well, obviously, the dad taught the kid well because how else is a kid going to know?
Anyway, Merry Christmas.
Bill in Tallahassee, Florida, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Thank you, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet, sir.
And I want to thank you for cutting through the minutia and getting to the truth on all this health care reform and all the other issues with Obama.
I've got an inconvenient truth for you on health care reform.
We could basically reform health care by capping the lawsuits with tort reform.
And also, my wife's a health care attorney, dealing with Medicaid, Medicare, and the fraud that goes on in Medicaid by filing fraudulent claims.
You could pay for health care just in cutting out the abuse that goes on.
Yeah, I had a story yesterday about $40 billion in Medicare fraud that was found recently or something.
It's rife.
Fraud is rife.
The food stamp program is rife with fraud.
They all are.
Social Security.
We have a whole segment of our culture and society that exists explicitly and expressly to game the system.
And they figured it out quite well.
Tort reform, obviously.
Tort reform would be huge.
The biggest problem is that one of the largest contributing groups to the Democrat Party is lawyers, trial lawyers.
They're not going to do anything to risk angering that bunch.
So don't look for tort reform while Democrats have anything to say about it.
Hal in Carrollton, Virginia, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush Megadettos.
Thank you.
Ma'am, Merry Christmas.
It's a privilege to finally get to speak to my professor.
Thank you, sir.
Yeah, I have a question, though, that I don't quite know how to answer.
I heard on one of the Sunday talk shows a couple weeks back, and then I had it repeated to me in a discussion I was having that Republicans or conservatives are hypocrites because we're against the big Medicare cuts that are in the current bill that's in the Senate.
And, you know, I was kind of blindsided because if conservatives are against big government and it's breaking the bank, then why are we as conservatives so angry about the big cuts in the current bill?
That happens to be the question of the day.
You have called the right person to get the answer.
Well, I knew I did.
All right, now you're right.
Theoretically, the Republican Party is against big government, the expansion of big government, and turning people into total dependents of the government, wards of the state.
However, here we have a political situation that's reared its ugly head.
Here is a health care bill.
The Democrats have promised that they're going to insure everybody at lower cost.
And yet, while they are doing that, they're going to cut Medicare by $500 billion.
Now, Medicare is the health program for the elderly in our country.
If you cut $500 billion out of it, it's going to have a disastrous effect on senior citizens.
Senior citizens are the largest voting block.
Now, this goes back, the next element of this goes back to the guy that called here earlier who works for the Senate.
He was talking about the rules of the Senate being sacrosanct and how they've been blown up.
There are certain agreements that we as a society have made with people.
And one of those agreements, via legislation, is Medicare.
So the elderly, knowing that the program is there, have ordered their lives according to it.
You can't blame them.
Medicare was devised to provide health coverage and health care for the elderly at a point in time when their earnings disperse.
Same thing with Social Security.
So people have been living their lives, planning their lives based on that promise made to them by their government.
So here comes this bill that's going to cut $500 billion.
And what I hear you saying, that a clean and pure as the wind-driven snow Republican conservative would stand up and say, I support the cuts.
I support the cuts because we need to reduce the size of government.
And it is a tricky thing.
But at this point, doing that would be breaking a rule.
Doing that would be breaking a promise, a commitment you've made to people.
In fixing this stuff going forward, and this is what so many of us had a problem with the Bush administration with the new Medicare entitlement, you don't expand it.
You reform the system, not expanding Medicare, not expanding Medicaid, but ultimately replacing them, knowing it can't be done overnight.
But the political component of this is that the Democrat Party is going to cut $500 billion out of Medicare after making these promises to the elderly.
Politically, that must be known.
The elderly must know what's going to happen to them if the Democrats succeed here because we want their opposition to it so that it doesn't succeed.
It's a real, it's a dilemma.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Go back to the tax cuts of 1986, the last round of tax cuts.
Those tax cuts really caused the savings and loan bubble.
They caused the SNL crisis and a real estate crisis because the rules of the game were changed.
We took the top marginal rate down to 28% in 1986.
In exchange, a whole lot of deductions vanished.
The deal was, we're going to take most of the deductions away, but it's going to be worth it to you because you're only going to get charged 28% on the last dollar you earn.
There were two rates, 15 and 28.
For some, there was a bubble rate of 31.
Well, that was all well and good, but it did affect people in the real estate business who had built condos and other things based on the depreciation and deductibility of their investments, which all of a sudden vanished.
So the rules of the game that they were playing by were changed on them in the middle of the game, the middle of their projects, the middle of the season, if you will.
So it's akin to that.
I happen to be in favor of the trade-off.
The SNL, we bailed them out.
We ended up bailing out some of the SNLs, and that gave us the Keating Five, if you remember that McCain was part of, you know, standard, ordinary, everyday corruption that exists throughout any large government bureaucracy.
So in this case, it's just a matter of, okay, we've made the promise.
We promised the seasoned citizens Medicare is going to be there for them.
You take $500 billion away from it, it ain't going to be there for them.
And we want those seniors to know who's taking it away from them.
We may not have agreed with it, but we lost the battle.
And in fact, some of our people back when Medicare continually expanded, I'll bet you most Republicans voted for the expansion.
It's the senior citizen voting block.
So I hope the answer explained.
You may not like it, but I hope that explains.
I'm glad you called, Hal.
Thanks very much for waving.
I appreciate it.
One more comment on the guy who just called and said, isn't it sort of hypocritical that we believe in smaller government and yet we don't agree with the Democrats' Medicare cuts?
It's a false premise.
And if any of the others of you in this audience are asked that question, well, you guys, how come you're so worried about the Medicare cuts?
I mean, how come you say you want smaller government?
Why are you not in favor of Medicare cuts?
The Republicans never call for Medicare cuts.
The dirty little secret here is that it's Democrats who are the hypocrites.
It is the Democrats who are always accusing Republicans of cutting Social Security, of cutting Medicare.
They're always charging us with cutting Medicare.
They're always charging when they cut Social Security.
Throw seniors out of their homes.
Make seniors eat dog food.
The Republicans are never the ones who start talking about these cuts.
It's all the Democrats accusing us.
And when it comes time to actually cut this stuff, it's the Democrats that do it.
Now, I frankly, I think if more people really knew what the Democrat plan is to cut $500 billion in Medicare, that alone would cause the seasoned citizens of this country to rise up.
Let's go to Atlanta.
This is Rob.
You're up next on the EIB network.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rosh.
It's an honor to speak with you.
Thanks for taking the call.
You bet.
My point is that the Republicans really need to get a backbone here.
They need to get at least as angry as Bernie Sanders was about pulling the bill, because if they don't, if they let this die in one news cycle, in a day, and they don't get some respect, then Harry Reid is going to let, it doesn't need his 60 votes.
He's going to be able to let it go on reconciliation, and it'll be a news story for a day, and nobody will care.
Well, to a point, I agree with you.
Although, I don't want to shortchange them a credit because Coburn and DeMint actually did this.
They actually voted against the unanimous consent and started reading the bill, and they forced the Democrats into breaking the rule.
Nobody is saying the Democrats broke the rule except us here on this program.
However, and this is not to make excuses for them.
I'm just telling you, I know where they are.
The Democrats or the Republicans really believe they've been snookered by another faulty premise put forth by the left.
They really believe that if they are too critical of the Democrats and their policy, that independents are going to hate them and that independents are going to get mad because independents don't like partisanship.
They really believe this.
This has been etched into their souls, and it is one of the most frustrating things to go through because the independents are leaving Democrats in droves right now.
The Republicans aren't doing anything.
But the Republicans fear that if they jumped on board, started criticizing, say, Harry Reid in public or Bernie Sanders, that that would stop the flow of independence from the Democrats to the Republicans because they've bought the notion that these independents are somehow the nicest, sweetest, purest people.
And the first sign of partisanship, they run to the Democrat Party.
It's bogus, but that's what they believe.
Did you hear that Senator Schumer on a shuttle from Washington to, or New York to Washington, may have called a flight attendant, which a federal employee, he's a federal employee, may have called the flight attendant a BIH because she wanted him to turn the cell phone off.
They couldn't leave the gate until he turned the cell phone off.
Couldn't close the door or whatever.
I'm Senator Schumer.
And he turned to whoever he was sitting next to and said, wow, what a BIH.
Now, I have a question for the Washington Post.
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