All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 21, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
December 21, 2009, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Greetings, my friends.
I am Rush Limbaugh.
I am America's truth detector, America's Doctor of Democracy, and general all-round good guy serving humanity simply by showing up here at the Limboy Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address LRushBall at EIBNet.com.
Everybody is wondering, So, Rush, what happens now when they have to reconcile the Senate bill with the House bill?
Because the House bill has a public option.
And the House bill has the Medicare buy-in, and the House bill has a lot more stuff that was taken out of the Senate bill.
And, of course, people we can no longer trust anymore, like Ben Nelson are saying, if anything in the Senate bill changes, my vote is no.
Now, Nancy Pelosi has said that she will sign anything.
She'll get anything through there.
I think my best guess is that the House will bite the bullet on this, ramrod this thing through, because remember, this is just the starter house on the way to building the big health care mansion.
Let me remind you of something else.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a companion bill in the House that I want to put in context of David Axelrod saying, hey, look, Howard Dean ought to be very happy.
We're essentially destroying the insurance companies here.
We're going to limit CEO pay.
And we're going to make sure that they don't spend wildly on administrative costs and their shareholder profits are held in check.
Fascism, folks.
Privately owned but run by the government.
Now, remember, insurance companies only averaged a little over a 2% profit last year.
So his promises to rein in the profits of big insurance ring a little hollow.
I mean, all you can do here is make sure that they end up with no profit.
And then you'll have to order them to stay in business or gladly accept their going out of business and then here'llo public option.
And I'm sure that's what they're going to tell the people in the House.
Just give us time.
Give us time.
We knew it would be 10 years before we'd get a full-fledged public option in there, full-fledged single-payer.
So just be patient with us.
The companion bill in the House, and Barney Frank keeps talking about this.
I mean, he's very proud of it.
The financial regulations bill, the overhaul of the regulatory system for the nation's financial community, allows the government to shut down any business, be it healthy or not, that they deem to provide a risk to the economy.
Remember now, Democrats and Obama are running around saying we need to build a new economic cycle so that the kind of things that happened last year, a year ago, do not happen.
And for that to happen, we must take the risk out of anything, Wall Street or anywhere else, with the banks, anywhere within the financial system.
So if they see a successful company that's doing gangbusters, but they still think that if that company failed at some point, that that would cause bad things, they can shut the company down or they can go in and rerun it.
Now, you put that side by side with what Axelrod here is touting as a way for Howard Dean and the left radicals to be happy.
Look what we're doing to the insurance company here.
We're destroying them.
It's a little microcosm.
So these guys are setting up a circumstance where every aspect of the American private sector will be under their control, even to the point being able to shut down a company simply on the basis that it, in their opinion, is too risky as it is currently operating.
Well, why didn't they shut down Fannie Mae?
Why they shut down Freddie Mac?
Because they control them.
That's how they were able to get the subprime mortgage thing going.
That's how they were able to get their constituents loans and in houses for which they would never have to pay.
Frank Rich, his column yesterday.
Tiger Woods Person of the Year.
Now, it's a little sarcastic here.
Tiger Woods, according to Frank Rich, should be the person of the year because he represents all the sham of the last decade.
What we have in Frank Rich's view is Tiger Woods as George W. Bush.
He turns out to be nothing like how he was portrayed.
Now, I would like to direct a question, not a question, I would like to say to Frank Rich, mark my words, Mr. Rich.
Just as Tiger Woods was unmasked as representing nothing the way he was portrayed, so shall that happen to President Obama.
It will happen in due course.
The parallels are amazing.
The press and interested parties created a perfect person in Tiger Woods.
Absolutely perfect.
This was done to maximize value in the corporate endorsement world, as well as to help the PGA Tour and a number of other places.
And we've now learned that nothing that we were told was true.
Barack Obama, the same.
He has had a career of five minutes, maybe 10 now.
We add this year to his life, 10-minute career.
Most of it spent in words.
Most of it spent reading teleprompters with a godlike echo behind his voice in most of his speeches.
Following his speech at a Democrat convention in 2004, we started getting puff pieces around 2006 and a half, midway through 2006, about what a great figure, messianic, why we had never before in the history of American politics seen a man or politician like this.
A man who was to transcend race, transcend partisanship, transcend standard politics.
A man, and by the way, I'd like to go back and ask David Rodham Gergen, who's all upset because no Republicans voted for this.
And it's the biggest social entitlement ever in American history, and it doesn't have the support of one of the political parties.
This is horrible.
Of course, he's blaming Republicans for this.
But I thought Obama was going to end all this.
I thought President Obama was going to be the end of this kind of partisanship, the end of racism.
But Hell's Bell's right.
If you criticize Obama on anything, you're a racist.
That's the only reason you criticize him.
Frank Rich starts his piece as we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade.
This much we can agree upon.
The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke.
No, no, no, no.
If there's been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it's that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled.
The men who played us for suckers, whether it's Citigroup or Fannie Mae or the White House or Ted Haggard's megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century's history so far.
That's why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods.
His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reducto ad absurdum of the decade's flim flams from the cancerous subprime mortgage to the inane balloon boy.
How do you mention this?
How do you write this with any integrity without mentioning Barack Obama, who is flim flam and phony?
And there's nobody who knows anything about him.
Nobody really knows who he is.
In fact, the people that he did hang around with, the people who did mentor him, the people who influenced him and educated him, we're all told he never heard them.
Bill Ayer is just a friend down the street.
I didn't know.
He blew up Pentagon.
That was a long time ago.
Never heard a word Reverend Wright said in 20 years, sitting in the pew of the church.
Frank Marshall Davis, a communist friend of his family's back in Hawaii.
Well, we know he heard Frank Marshall Davis because he loves him.
He's written about him.
But all that we were told to ignore and instead rely on the farcical image that has been created, the puff piece image that has been created by the American media.
Chris Dodd, ladies and gentlemen, there's a mysterious $100 million that people found in the health care bill.
By now, you've probably heard about the mystery appropriation for $100 million research medical facility buried in the Senate's health care reform bill.
It's for Chris Dodd.
Headline, it's from an amused Associated Press.
Dodd gets $100 million for UConn Health Center, put in Bill UConn, the University of Connecticut.
But what a name for what's happened to all of us.
UConn!
A $100 million item for construction of a university hospital inserted in the health care bill at the request of Senator Dodd, who faces a difficult reelection campaign.
Slush fund anybody?
This is exactly, where do you think this money's coming from?
How about from the Porculus bill?
You think those will be the funds that will be used for it?
Or the unspent TARP money?
We've got slush money all over the place voted by the Congress one year ago and almost one year ago for just this kind of thing.
And Mr. Dodd's office is actually proud of this achievement.
The legislation leaves it up to the Health and Human Services Department to decide where the money should be spent, although spokesman Brian DeAngelis said that Dodd hopes to claim it for the University of Connecticut.
How coy.
And Russ Feingold, this is from the Huffing and Puffington Post.
Senator Russ Feingold formally announced on Sunday that he would support the final version of Senate health care reform, but in doing so, he cast blame for the loss of a public option for insurance coverage partially on the Obama administration.
Here's from a statement.
I've been fighting all year for a strong public option to compete with the insurance industry and bring health care spending down.
I continued that fight during recent negotiations, and I refused to sign on to a deal to drop the public option from the Senate bill.
Unfortunately, the lack of support from the administration made keeping the public option in the bill an uphill struggle.
Removing the public auction from the Senate bill is the wrong move.
It eliminates $25 billion in savings.
I will be urging members of the House and Senate to draft the final bill to make sure this essential provision is included.
The final bill will probably be the Senate bill.
If this goes to a conference, it may all fall apart.
And I guarantee you, they're not going to let that happen.
They are not going to let that happen.
But Feingold, there's no other way to describe this whole notion that the insurance companies need competition than utterly stupid and ignorant of the market system.
If you want competition in the insurance companies, let them sell insurance across state lines.
There are 17,000 insurance companies out there of all different sizes and types.
The idea that a public option, a government-run insurance plan, would provide them competition, all it would do is put them out of business because a government-run insurance company does not have to show a profit.
A government-run insurance company could underprice things on purpose to put them out of business and to get all employers shuffling their coverage off of their own books onto the governments.
So it's a, if these guys would just be patient, Howard Dean and all the rest, if they would just be patient, they could be made to understand how they're going to get everything they want, provided they can hold on to their majorities in the House and Senate next November.
By the way, one other note about Ben bribed Nelson here, ladies and gentlemen.
This is from the Politico from yesterday.
Nelson says he received assurances of a limited conference.
I guess that means with the House, to secure his vote for the Senate bill, but he laid down at least two deal breakers in the House bill that he cannot support.
One is the inclusion of a government insurance plan and an income tax increase on wealthy individuals.
That would break it.
Nelson said this yesterday on CNN's State of the Union.
Now, I don't know what's going to happen when they get together with the House on this bill.
I have a feeling that Pelosi is going to just tell these people, look, we're not going to have a conference.
We're going to take a Senate bill.
We're going to ram it through there, and we'll start making improvements the minute we come back after we've got this framework.
But I don't know how in the world he doesn't think there are already tax increases on wealthy individuals.
The Medicare tax alone goes up on wealthy individuals.
There are tax increases on the wealthy throughout the bill in the Senate version before you even get to the House version.
To the phones to Waterloo, Iowa.
And I'm glad you waited.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you for taking my call.
You bet.
Well, I had a really rough couple of weeks trying to get some good night's sleep.
I'm not talking about the bed, but I'm just talking about looking and hearing and reading all the stuff going on, healthcare, all of these socialistic moves, the lying.
I mean, I wish people would just quit being so politically correct and start calling Obama what he is.
He is a liar.
And I'm calling basically because I kind of went through this thing on the internet last night, and there's, to me, like a lot of stuff going on where people are just so angry that it almost to me, I pick up something like, it's going to go to a next stage of anger.
And I think we all kind of know what that means.
You know, when you get to a point where all the faxing that you do, like what people have been trying to do or doing to all the senators, and I myself, I've done so many phone calls, Rush, I have the whole book on the brassfire.org congressional dictionary.
And I have for three days been trying and trying and trying to fax at least 20 to 30 of these senators, and none of the facts is true.
I call some of the people I talk to also try calling, as I have, at 12 o'clock at night, and all the mailboxes are full.
To me, it's like, if you aren't going to pay attention to us and what we are really saying to listen to us, I guess, you know, it's like anybody else.
If you don't care to listen to me, if you close your door, you lock your door, then we don't care.
Wait, wait a second.
Let me step in here because I want to try to save you some mental energy.
You're looking at this the entire wrong way.
They're not listening to us.
They have the polling data.
You're wasting your time emailing them.
You're wasting your time faxing them.
You're wasting your time calling them.
This is no longer a representative republic.
This is not a democracy.
You're nothing but a gnat.
You're an inconvenience, especially if you disagree with what they're doing.
You're somebody to be gotten even with.
You're somebody whose mind isn't right yet.
You are somebody that they're going to have to erase.
They don't want to have to deal with your opposition.
This is why I've been saying for practically my entire broadcast career behind this microphone.
The only way, the only way to understand this is to understand what liberalism is and who liberals are, radical leftists.
And at that point, you will understand how truly insignificant you are.
They don't matter to you.
They're not even thinking about what you want and don't want.
They're not thinking about how they can best respond to public opinion here to prolong their careers or to do the best for the country.
This is about them.
This is about perpetuity, power in perpetuity.
This is about ruling you, not governing the country.
This is not about we the people.
It's about them, the political class.
They have sought this moment ever since FDR.
They have sought total control over this country, over this population, over individuals in this country for years.
They have made a mockery of the notion that they're interested in what you think or care about your public opinion or their public opinion.
They're not.
They know the risks that they're running.
That's why they have these slush funds to help with their reelection efforts, to try to help whatever fraud it takes next November with Acorn or what have you.
They know that nobody wants this.
They know vast majorities don't want this.
That alone ought to tell you what we're dealing with and who they are.
Now, the anger, I can understand it, but I know you all get it.
I know you all understand exactly what's happening here, and I know you all understand why it's bad and why it's not healthy for the country and so forth.
But the idea that this can be changed with some faxes or phone calls to this group, they're shutting all that down.
Their mailboxes aren't full.
They just got them shut down.
They just have a return message saying the mailbox is full.
They're not looking at the mailboxes in email or snail mail.
They're not looking at phone calls.
It's all a sham.
They want you to think they are, that they're overwhelmed and trying to pay attention.
But this is all about them.
Listen to what Ben Nelson says.
Listen to what Mary Landrew says.
It's all about the best for my state.
That means it's all about the best for my reelection.
They think that the people of their states are going to vote for them because they, the people, are being bought off with a hospital or full-fledged Medicaid expansion paid for by the federal government, which is nothing more than them.
The federal government's not paying for anything that they don't first tax from us or print for themselves.
We'll be right back.
Sit tight.
You know, folks, a question of why don't we just solve all of our problems like we're solving the problem of health care insurance coverage?
I mean, this health care reform really shows us how foolish we've been when facing our problems in the past by tweaking around the edges instead of taking them head-on.
You say 40 million Americans are unsured?
Well, hell's bells, we can fix that.
We're just going to pass a law requiring everybody to buy health care insurance.
Why didn't we think of that sooner?
How many trillions of dollars have we wasted in the war on poverty?
Why didn't we just make poverty against the law?
Anyone earning under the poverty level will have to pay a fine or go to jail.
15 million people unemployed, throw them in jail if they won't work.
Salve Adobe.
I mean, we're just going to, with a stroke of a pen, sign a law and fix the problem.
Look how easy this could be.
We don't have to spend $2.5 trillion, create 111 new bureaucracies, 2,000 pages of legislation just to make people buy insurance.
Now, that's what we've got here, because essentially that's all we're doing.
We're making everybody buy insurance or put them in jail or fine them if they don't.
And we're doing that with 2,000 pages of legislation, 111 new bureaucracies, and 2.5 trillion taxpayer dollars.
All you have to do is add a line or two to the tax code to fix this, the way they're going about it.
But see, that's our Congress for you.
They don't want things to be simple.
And it proves, looking at it that way, that this is not about health insurance.
It's not about insuring everybody because this bill doesn't do that even after 15 or 20 years.
This is about power and control, confiscating one-sixth of the U.S. private sector.
Here's Dingy Harry this afternoon.
Democrats are having a press conference.
Senate Democrats are.
Here's a portion of what Dingy Harry had to say.
Like those in the medical field, our responsibility as legislators is to care for all people, not just those that are fortunate.
That's what this historic reform fixes.
It starts to break down the wall between a class of Americans who can afford to stay healthy and another that cannot.
What an outrage.
That is not your job.
And it starts to break down the wall.
Starts to break down the wall.
This is just the beginning.
Our responsibility as legislators is to care for all people, not just those that are fortunate.
That's what this, the whole class envy thing again.
And this, you know, they're figuring that saying things like this, most people are not wealthy.
Most people are middle class.
And that's how they attempt to get the middle class on their, hey, we're doing this for you, and we're going to punish the rich in the process.
And that's why you should support it.
That's worked somewhat in the past, not nearly as well as everybody thinks, but it's not going to work this time because everybody knows that's not what this bill is.
This bill punishes everybody, mandates that everybody do something.
If they really wanted to, well, I'm not even going to go there.
It's just an insult.
All of this is just a full-fledged insult, but they are being who they are.
If you wonder what's going on, you're watching liberalism, progressivism, radical leftism, whatever you want to call it.
You're watching it full-fledged, out in the open, no disguises.
Back to the phones.
Dan and Fremont, New Hampshire.
Nice to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Megan did.
I was rushed from the live-free or die state.
Remember, death is not the worst of evils.
What I wanted to talk to you about is that what the people need to do is get behind their state governments and get their state governments to stand up to the federal government and its overreaching this usurpation of powers.
We have a bill here in New Hampshire that's going to make it a misdemeanor to interfere with the health care or health insurance of a New Hampshire citizen based upon a federal law to which our general court has not given its consent.
Well, it's an idea, except the states are being bought off.
The reason the states are not going to oppose this is that they're all being bought off.
Look at Nebraska.
Look at Vermont.
Look at what are the other states.
Louisiana, they're all being bought off.
Well, New Hampshire wasn't bought off.
Our Democrat senator wasn't smart enough to hold out.
Well, yeah, okay, you got a point.
That's why I said earlier in the show, where are all these other states and these governors and state legislatures complaining about all the special deals these four or five other states got that they didn't get?
They're probably still in the process of figuring it out.
They're still in the process of figuring out what all has really happened here.
Not to mention what you point out, there are so many constitutional violations.
The Equal Protection Clause.
Remember, too, that the Constitution only says that the Constitution, laws pursuant to it, and treaties are the supreme law of the land.
Therefore, this monster is not part of the supreme law of the land.
Well, yeah, technically it's not, but it is until somebody fights it and challenges it on that basis.
Well, that's what we've got to do.
We've got to rally people around their state legislators, embolden them.
That's part of our job.
It is one way to do it.
I agree with you.
Senator Lindsey Gramnesty of South Carolina has asked the Attorney General of that state to investigate the deals because South Carolina and Lindsey Gramnesty were left out.
Well, and the article of the federal constitution that they're claiming this power under also says that all duties, exercises, and taxes have to be uniform.
And though this is kind of an inverse to additional payments, it still ends up being a tax.
Well, I know.
That's what I meant about the Equal Protection Clause being violated here.
So many elements, parts of the Constitution, have been trashed and shredded here to make this happen.
Taxation without any accompanying benefits for four years.
I mean, it's just, it's an abomination.
It is an utter disgrace.
It is not American.
And it's I don't think the Democrats understand the boiling rage that exists throughout this country because their willing accomplices in the state-controlled media are not reporting it.
And they are shutting off any response.
They don't want to see the faxes that you're sending or the emails that you're sending.
They want to hear the phone calls that you're making.
And they're living in a dream world and pretending that if you don't care, it doesn't matter, that you're just a nutcase that's been primed by talk radio.
And it's not going to matter once the November elections come around because you're either going to forget about it and other things are going to be taking hold.
Unemployment's going to start going down.
They think the economic circumstance will improve.
That'll make everybody forget this sort of thing.
Tax increases are going to start immediately, but the health care benefits delayed for four years.
So they think the true debacle of this, and by the way, part of the benefits, the things that are being delayed four years, and I made this point in the first hour of the program.
You go back to the old professionals, FDR and LBJ, when they came up with Social Security, War on Poverty, Great Society, they front-loaded the benefits, backloaded the tax increases.
So you got the goodies with apparently having not to pay for it.
And by that time, the goodies were entrenched and special interests had evolved all around them to protect them.
This bunch is going at it the opposite way.
You are paying for it first, and then you get the so-called benefits four years down the road.
Now, the reason they're rolling the dice on this is because there aren't any benefits.
What's waiting for us four years down the road is 100% government control over our lives.
If that kicked in immediately, they would not have one Democrat win re-election in 2010, other than from places like San Francisco and New York, Boston, places like that.
If they delay government control of everybody's life till 2014, that means that Congress gets re-elected in 2010 and 2012, this is how they're thinking about it, and Obama gets re-elected in 2012, and then the revolt comes and nothing can be done about it because everybody has won re-election.
That's their thinking.
I believe that their thinking is flawed because I think all of these tax increases they're going to hit immediately amidst 10 to 17 percent unemployment with no end in sight to that are going to be so devastating to this economy that backpocket economic issues are going to be the overriding factor in November along with the details of this health care bill because by the time November 2010 comes around, there isn't going to be one American who doesn't understand what a total travesty this is.
Quick timeout back after this.
Now, let me give you another take on what Ben Nelson has set up here by saying, if this bill goes to conference with the House and if the public option goes back in, and if there are tax increases on the wealthy, and he will vote against it, all that crap, it's just crap.
All that's just crap.
What he is setting up, he's setting the stage for reconciliation.
He's setting the stage for a 51-vote majority rather than 60.
That's the really the only way that you can interpret this.
He's not holding out for any more money.
He just set the stage for 51-majority passage of the bill.
All this crap that he's going to vote against it's got, it's already got tax increases in it.
Have the public options put back in it.
You can't count on his vote.
That just means they'll go to reconciliation.
They will, dingy Harry, they have shown with as desperate as they are with what they're doing now that if they have whatever they have to do to get this passed, they will do it.
Now, what Sterdley just said to me, violate the rules.
Violate the rules?
They've just stood the Constitution upside down.
You think I'd give a rat's rear end about violating a Senate rule on when reconciliation can and can't be used?
By the way, to explain it, the Senate rules are that you have to have 60 votes to pass anything because you need 60 votes to stop debate on any piece of legislation.
If you get the 60 votes to stop the debate, that generally guarantees you that you get the 60 votes to pass when the ultimate vote for the bill comes up.
Reconciliation is the one exception because the Constitution mandates that the federal government have a budget every year.
Reconciliation allows for the budget to be passed with a simple majority vote of 51 or however many senators are present at the time of the vote.
It would be very, very, very much against the rules, ladies and gentlemen, to go for reconciliation on health care.
But the rules have been thrown out as it is.
Now, Robert Costa has a post at the National Review Corner blog and into discussion with Eric Cantor, the House Minority Whip.
And here's the premise.
If the Senate bill passed it, which it did, it'll head to the House of Representatives.
And the question is, once it gets there, will Republicans have any chance of stopping it?
And so National Review Online asked Representative Eric Cantor, the House Minority Whip, for answers.
And he said, once in the House, it'll be about what Nancy Pelosi wants to see happen.
If it goes to conference, if it goes to conference, the public will have a better chance to understand what the bill means and to open up some discussion.
We need to do that on a wide variety of issues, from life to the real costs inside this bill.
The conference process would allow for a lot more deliberation.
If not, if Speaker Pelosi tries to ram this through, that would be a real game changer.
That would be an extraordinary letdown for the American people.
I am going to bide my tongue.
A real letdown for the American people?
What the hell do they think is happening now?
It's not a game changer.
Now, Cantor predicts that abortion will be the key issue in the House's debate of the Senate bill.
Pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan has outlined very clear language on abortions, made it clear that if it's not included, then he'll vote against the bill.
There's a lot of reticence among many moderate Democrats.
And here we're back to this.
I don't believe there are any at the end of the day on this.
We'll find out.
We'll find out what the blue dogs want.
Do they really want to be reelected?
Or do they want to let Nancy Pelosi throw them out of the House by getting their vote for this?
She wants to thin the herd.
She would love to get rid of these blue dogs.
They're a problem.
So it's unfathomable.
He says here it's unfathomable to think that pro-life Democrats would go for the Senate version.
They know that the Senate's bill is a 30-year record-breaking move to allow taxpayer dollars to fund abortion.
I can't imagine any moderate Dems in the House supporting it, says Eric Cantor.
I can.
They're liberals.
I can see it just by watching what's going on in the Senate and knowing who Pelosi is and how much is writing on this.
Now, Eric Cantor also notes that he's kept a close eye on the Senate during its debate.
He says, what disappoints me is all their deal-cutting and horse trading.
They're allocating taxpayer dollars as if those dollars belong to the senators.
It borders on immoral.
Just look at the way Senator Landrew put her vote up for sales.
Senator Nelson did the same.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Does border on immoral.
It's more than disappointing.
It ought to have everybody outraged and throwing a fit.
If you're disappointed, you don't go on television to say so.
If you're outraged, you do whatever it takes to stop this.
Heritage Foundation today, the Morning Bell, which is their blog.
The healthcare fight has just begun.
The months-long drama over the fate of Obama's health care plan ended at 1 o'clock this morning.
60-40 votes, strictly party-line to end debate on Harry Reid's Manager's Amendment.
Now, the Manager's Amendment is where all the deals are.
The Manager's Amendment is what the Republicans, I think Coburn, is now threatening to read in its entirety.
Some 800 pages, I believe it is.
Okay, they read the Manager's Amendment over the weekend.
Now, I was in the Bahamas.
You watched it.
Well, then you know, if you watched it, so I knew what's in the manager's amendment.
It's outrageous what this if it's just, it's I'm out of words to describe it.
When Lieberman and Nelson threatening to veto the bill if any significant changes are made by the House in conference, it is virtually guaranteed that this is the version of Obamacare that will be signed by the president before his State of the Union address in January.
The Heritage Foundation thus believes there will not be a conference, that there will be no amendments to the Senate bill, because if there are, the Senate bill fails if we are to believe Nelson and Lieberman.
So Pelosi will ram this thing through.
As they say here, final passage of the bill will be historic, but not in the way Obama intended.
Never before has such a large restructuring of the U.S. economy been passed on a straight party line vote.
Never before has legislation so unpopular with the American people been passed on a straight party line vote.
Never before has the fate of one-sixth of our economy been so dependent on backroom deals and payoffs, the full extent of which may not be known for years.
To defend this abomination, the White House did not send the health reform director Nancy Ann DeParl or budget director Peter Orzog.
They sent political consultant David Axelrod to defend the bill, and he did so by saying, hey, don't worry, we are making sure that we're going to cut back on the amount of salary CEOs can get at the insurance companies.
We're going to limit their shareholder profits and we're going to limit their administrative costs.
But this bill busts the federal budget contrary to what Obama lied about this morning before this program started talking about all the deficit reduction.
It busts state budgets as well.
It increases health care costs.
It endangers Americans' quality of care.
It forces Americans to pay for abortions.
There are $400 billion in new taxes on employment to taxes on tanning beds.
$400 billion in new taxes at a time of double-digit unemployment, including $29 billion in taxes on 19 million Americans who still will not receive health insurance benefits even after 10 years.
Fast as three hours in the media.
I can't believe that the first two are already in the can.
But they are, my friends, and we've only got mere seconds remaining here in this one.
But be patient.
We'll be back and resume broadcast excellence.
More of your phone calls.
▲
Export Selection