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Jan. 7, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:35
January 7, 2010, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And here we are, just as promised, we are back, ladies and gentlemen, and I am Rush Limbaugh meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
No mean feat, but we pull it off here.
And great to have you here with us for three straight hours at Broadcast Excellence.
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Audio Soundbites, a group gathered outside the White House yesterday, urging people to come together.
The name of the group is Pray at the Pump.
We want President Obama and Rush Limbaugh to stop fighting and come together.
Many of us were, you know, a little bit concerned that when Limbaugh had that heart scare out there that, you know, Obama didn't go by and visit and, you know, not even send a card or because we believe in the Bible that we should love our enemies and bless those that persecute us and despitefully use us.
We thought that that would have been a very great teachable moment for the Nobel Peace Prize winner to become involved in.
So it's almost like a divine providence that they were both together in the same place at Christmas.
I hope that somehow he would maybe just call Rush Limbaugh and just say, I'm glad you're back today.
That's Rocky Twyman, ladies and gentlemen, who is the founder of Pray at the Pump.
And that was outside the White House yesterday.
Now, this is the first I heard of it.
Patrick Gavin of Politico interviewed the Pray at the Pump founder, Rocky Twyman.
Now, it's interesting that this guy says, you know, Obama, he's hoping Obama showed up to the hospital to say hello.
I got to tell you something, folks.
I wasn't even going to mention this.
I wasn't going to mention this.
I'm a little queasy about mentioning it now, but I was hoping he wouldn't.
I had as much stress over that as I had over trying to figure out what the chest pains were because I kept expecting the door of the hospital room to open and a Secret Service guy to come in and say the president would like to come in and say hi.
And you can't turn that down.
And Catherine said, don't worry, that's never going to happen.
And then a nurse came, a male nurse came in and started joking, unknowing that I was even thinking about it.
The male nurse came in.
His name was Ray, I think, and he said, hey, by the way, a couple Secret Service agents are out there surveying the place.
It looks like Obama might want to come by for lunch.
I was like, no, no, no, no.
And he started laughing.
He was just kidding.
Can you imagine if that had happened?
Can you imagine if that had happened?
I might have had a real heart attack.
But if that had happened, oh, no, no, no.
Catherine said, don't worry.
That's not going to happen.
They're not going to come over here.
They're going to act like you even exist.
They won't do that.
But here's Rocky Twyman out there actually suggesting that President Obama and I stop fighting.
Not President Obama and the Republicans.
Not President Obama and Mitch McConnell or President Obama and John Maymer.
John Boehner.
No.
President Obama and Rush Limbaugh.
Brian Lamb, by the way, has just, he was on a radio program yesterday.
Brian Lamb just blasts Obama on the C-SPAN promise.
He promised eight different times to have healthcare deliberations televised so that people could see what choices were available.
And there's, I think, one hour total of healthcare debate has been televised in the Senate.
Here's Brian Lamb yesterday.
We are an independent journalistic institution, and the president, or when he was a candidate, had no right to assume that we would cover anything.
We were used as kind of a political football during the campaign.
We obviously would cover these negotiations.
The only time we've been allowed to cover the White House part of it is one hour inside the East Room, which was kind of just a show horse type of thing.
The American people pay for all this that goes on in this town.
If we pay for something and it's the public's business, we ought to be able to see how it's done.
And Brian Lamb is not the only one.
Jack Cafferty on CNN unloaded on Obama.
I guess it was yesterday.
I watched the video clip on YouTube.
I'm going to have to send it up to Cookie and have her prepare it here for us.
It's just the latest lie from the Obama administration.
You would think that Cafferty is talking about George W. Bush.
There are a lot of people on the Democrat side of things here who do not dig this.
Remember now, all politicians lie.
All politicians break their promises.
But Obama was different.
Obama was something like which we've never seen before.
Obama was post-partisan.
Obama was post-racial.
Obama was post-accomplishment, by the way.
He hadn't accomplished anything.
He was post-everything.
We're going to have a new guy, unlike anything we'd ever had before.
His promises were believed.
And he's breaking them left and right, and he doesn't even seem to care.
He doesn't even seem to acknowledge.
He doesn't seem to be concerned with it in any way, shape, manner, or form.
I have an interesting story here in the Washington Post.
Actually, it's an op-ed column by the Reverend Al Sharpton.
And the headline of the piece is, Celebrities and Athletes Offer a Poor Example on Guns and Violence.
The Reverend Sharpton begins his piece with this.
The recent headlines were chilling.
NBA players allegedly brandishing guns in the Verizon Center locker room.
Gang and youth violence plagues U.S. cities, and people constantly ask, what are young Americans thinking?
Well, when we look at today's athletic and entertainment stars, we begin to see the answer.
Maybe young Americans are thinking like they're role models.
Athletes are actors who, fairly or unfairly, have become the billboards of violent and destructive behavior.
Now, I'm not going to read the rest of this.
I'll summarize it for you.
The Reverend Sharpton says that there is a culture of violence in sports and recklessness, too.
Now, I've heard somebody say something like that before.
I've heard somebody suggest that sometimes these contests look like the bloods in the crypts.
Do you remember who said that, Brian?
Well, whoever said it was deemed unfit to be part of the National Football League.
That would be me.
And yet here's Reverend.
We should go out and ask Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, what he thinks of the Reverend Sharpton's comment here that there's a culture of violence in sports and recklessness, too.
Maybe the commissioner thinks Al Sharpton has a good point.
I'd just be interesting to hear that.
Once again, proving, ladies and gentlemen, that I, your host, am on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
One of the things Democrats are mad at President Obama about is he is urging an excise tax on high-cost insurance.
Even Pelosi is upset about this.
She doesn't want there to be any tax increase on the middle class, like Obama promised.
But there are tax increases on everybody, including the middle class, throughout the Senate health care bill.
The White House has long expressed a preference for the excise tax on high-cost plans.
What the House Democrats want is an increase in the income tax.
Obama and the Senate want an excise tax on the Cadillac plans.
The Senate proposal would impose a 40% excise tax on the cost of individual insurance policies above $8,500 and on family policies above $23,000 with higher thresholds for retirees and employees in high-risk fields like police officers.
40% excise tax.
And the Washington Post says healthcare reform bill's proposed tax on high-cost plans raises question.
The plans being taxed are not all Cadillacs in terms of lavish benefits.
Some are going to be taxed because of the state they're in and the type of business that they're in and the age of their workers, all that drives up cost.
So there's some people, another campaign promise being broken.
And it's no big deal when a politician breaks a campaign promise, but with Obama, you know, the rumblings are small, but they're starting to happen on the left now, on the Democrat side of things.
Gidmo, for example, has not been closed.
And this mess with counterterrorism, the counterterrorism chief, he was on a ski slope somewhere when he was told of the Christmas Day bomber.
He stayed on the ski slopes.
He did not come back to town to the counterterrorism center.
Now, you can have the greatest system, quote unquote, in the world.
If you don't have good people running it, the great system's worthless.
And we do not have great people running any of these systems.
All right.
How many years is it, folks, that we have been hearing that cell phones are going to cause brain cancer?
10 years?
10 years we've been hearing this.
And, you know, you hear this over enough, and some people do get frightened about it.
Well, from Reuters, a totally unphased Reuters, a study in mice suggests that using cell phones may help prevent some of the brain-wasting effects of Alzheimer's disease.
Or as Denny Crane called it, mad cow disease.
This is according to U.S. researchers.
After long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves, such as those used in cell phones, mice, genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's, performed as well on memory and thinking skill tests as healthy mice.
Quite the contrary, these mice were protected if the cell phone exposure was stared in early adulthood.
Now, decade, at least 10 years have gone by, trying to convince us that we all have a, well, you, I don't use the phone.
I hate it.
I always hated the phone, but those of you, but you see people glued to their cell phones and these people that we've been told that there is a lurking brain tumor from our cell phones just waiting to explode out there.
And now we're being told that the cell phone will keep us from getting mad cow disease or Alzheimer's.
So what do we do?
What do we do?
Well, if you're over 70, why don't we just Velcro a cell phone constantly on to every head of every senior citizen and be done with it?
You know, one of the reasons, I'm sure the main reason, folks, that Obama decided not to visit me in a hospital is that he thought he would heal me.
And he didn't want that to happen.
That has to be the reason.
Here's Jack Cafferty, and this is, yep, yesterday see it in the Situation Room.
How dare they, President Obama, Democratic leaders have decided to bypass the formal House and Senate conference committee in order to reconcile those two health care bills.
Instead, White House and Democratic leaders will hold informal, that's another word for secret negotiations, meant to shut Republicans and the public out of the process.
What a far cry from the election when then-candidate Obama pledged to, quote, broadcast health care negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, unquote.
President Obama hasn't even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency in government.
It was all just another lie that was told in order to get elected.
Here's hoping the voters remember some of this crap when the midterm elections roll around later this year.
Baby, just another lie that was told in order to get elected.
Now, this is the way that Cafferty sputtered and spewed about George Bush every day, practically every day during Bush's administration.
This, I mean, this is categorizing Obama as no different than anybody else.
And that, my friends, is the relation, the realization that a lot of these people who drank the Kool-Aid are now beginning to have.
Speaking of Obama's tax increase on health care, let's go back.
Here's a presidential candidate ad that Obama ran.
It's entitled One Word.
This is in 2008, ran this ad against Senator McCain.
I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message.
On health care, John McCain promises a tax credit.
But here's what he won't tell you.
McCain would impose a new tax on health benefits, taxing your health care for the first time ever.
It's a multi-trillion dollar tax hike, the largest middle-class tax increase in history.
You won't find one word about it on his website.
But the McCain tax could cost your family thousands.
Can you afford it?
Yeah, I know, I know.
Politics as usual, Pa, but still going to point this out.
McCain being accused of lying, and here's Obama doing exactly what he accused McCain of wanting to do, and that is raise your taxes by thousands.
I was communicating with a buddy of mine this morning, and there's a story in the New York Times about Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak.
Now, Bart Stupak is a pro-life Democrat, which makes him a dinosaur.
Except he's not extinct, but he's close.
And he is actively fighting the health care bill in the House of Representatives, a Democrat.
And my buddy and I started to theorize it without theorizing it.
We realized that a Democrat is saying more in opposition to the health care bill than elected Republicans are.
Where are they?
They treat this as just another piece of legislation, and you're going to add amendments to it to improve it.
The American people don't want any of this.
This is such a golden opportunity for the Republican Party once again to contrast itself to Stanley.
Look, folks, there are a number of reasons here why they don't.
I think the main reason is that the longer you live in that town, the more you become of that town.
And these leaders that have been there 25 or 30 years, or 10 or 15, they are of Washington now.
And when you are of Washington, you are of government.
And you just believe in trading power now and then.
And the constituents are to be mollified every election year, but after they have to hell with it.
And then I think there's a residual fear, in addition to becoming of Washington.
I think there's a residual fear that they're going to be criticized and they're going to be called racist and they're going to be called other things if they start criticizing Obama.
Everybody is starting to criticize Obama now and it knows no boundary.
I mean, people on both sides of the aisle are criticizing Obama.
I bring all of this up because the Gallup poll has reported today that conservatives have finished 2009 as the number one ideological group.
And the uptick owes largely to the fact that more independents are now calling themselves conservatives.
So the Republicans are scared to death that they're going to anger independents and moderates.
At a period of time where independents and moderates are now flooding to the Republican Party and not because the party's done anything, if the party leaders would come out and start echoing, validating the criticisms of this health care bill shared by their constituents and the majority of the American people, even more people would flock to them.
What they're probably saying is, eh, we're going well here by not doing anything.
It could be much better.
Stop this.
It's not too late.
Remember, 300 Spartans came close to stopping at Thermopylae.
Political independence showed increased attachment to the conservative label in 2009, boosting the overall ranks of that group so that it now clearly outnumbers moderates in Gallup's annual averages for the first time since 2004.
There is a conservative ascendancy.
There is no desire for moderate Republicans.
No moderates, anybody running on the Republican ticket ought to be working like mad to win the conservative vote.
If you win the conservative vote, you're going to win the election.
Pure and simple.
It's in the data.
And we are off to a rousing start, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, state-controlled Associated Press.
In Florida, state wildlife officials say that 429 manatees died in Florida last year.
That's nearly 100 more deaths than in 2008.
You know why?
Why so many manatee deaths?
Cold, cold stress during the winter months of 2008 and 2009 in the middle of global warming.
Manatee deaths and not being run over by boaters anymore.
Cold stress from cold water in the middle of global warming in the winter in Florida is killing more manatees.
By the way, this New York Times story on Bart Stupak, they call him the most hated man in Congress.
He's a Democrat.
All he wants, all he wants is for the language in the health care bill to match current law, which it doesn't.
He's holding out for that.
And by the way, I have seen, well, I see the story yesterday.
I think I maybe have it in yesterday's stack.
Or maybe I saw it last.
I can't remember.
I thought, saw the number 31 House Democrats are getting cold feet on this thing now.
And, of course, the conference committee is not taking place.
They're ping-ponging this back and forth.
Pelosi says they almost got it done.
And nobody knows what's getting done.
Nobody knows what the final bill is going to look like.
You know, Stupak in this Times piece says he'd be glad to vote for it if they just fix the language in the health care bill to match current law.
And that's all.
It's all he's asking.
And yet they label him the most hated man in Congress.
Which just goes to show you how rabid the pro-aborts are.
From New York, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday said the costs of hosting the federal trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other suspected September 11th plotters would get this now top $200 million annually.
And he formally requested that Washington cover the costs.
He said New York's financial resources are in short supply.
And we have been forced to reduce our police department's headcount.
This is a letter to the White House Budget Director Peter Orsog.
Securing the trial will require us to pull existing personnel from crime prevention efforts around the city and require significant overtime expenses.
They estimate that the cost for security, just security for the trial, $216 million the first year and $206 million annually thereafter.
Now, what an absurd proposition.
$200 million a year, which clearly indicates that this trial of the century is a sure show trial that's going to go on for years by design, brought to you by Obama and Eric Holder.
And this is a show trial essentially for one guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who doesn't even deserve a trial.
This guy ought to be before he asked to be executed, ladies and gentlemen.
But now he's all excited.
He's thrilled.
$200 million a year to secure him during his trial in New York.
That's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from a recording studio installed at Club Gitmo and his version of New York, New York.
Something's going on.
I'm not sure what's going on, but something, something, well, it's probably pretty easy to guess.
These next two stories are fascinating.
Ben Nelson.
Ben Nelson says that he never asked for Harry Reid to give Nebraska more funding for Medicaid.
He says he never asked for it.
Now, the governor said something about it.
The governor said something about it, but Ben Nelson says he never asked for it.
And now Blanche Lincoln says that the Cornhusker bribe that Nebraska was given should be deleted.
Blanche Lincoln, senator from Arkansas, says, hey, we shouldn't have done it.
She said a political deal that benefits Nebraska and may have clinched, may have clinched lawmakers' support for the legislation should be removed from the bill.
Blanche Lincoln said she was disappointed about a provision that'll require the federal government to permanently pay the entire cost of Medicaid expansion in Nebraska while only paying the costs of expansion in the other 49 states for three years.
She said the people of Arkansas did not send me to Washington to be a horse trader.
Now, what's going on here?
Is she simply now trying to revert to populism and save her own skin so that she doesn't become the next Chris Dodd or helmet head Dorgan and be asked to quit?
And speaking of that, you know, folks, this Chris Dodd, especially, Dorgan shocked him.
Dorgan was a genuine surprise.
I don't think that anybody knew that Dorgan's resignation was coming.
But somebody, somebody, somebody had to go to Chris Dodd and say, you're out of here.
These guys, you have to understand, especially these Democrats.
This is the power.
I mean, this guy, Dodd, is a financial regulation reform bill that is just outrageous, that he wrote, and it's going to police Wall Street like it's never been policed before.
It's power.
Fannie Mae Freddie Mac, he's involved in that, along with Barney Frank.
To get this kind of power has been his aspiration since getting in the Senate.
That's what it's all about.
To have 60 votes, however hook and crook you get them.
To be able to have any piece of legislation you want and to be able to be said that you are the engine behind it.
And then all of a sudden, you are asked to leave or you announce that it's time to move on.
Nobody can convince me that Chris Dodd came up with the idea himself.
It's time to move on, even if the polls showing his reelection bid in Connecticut is in big trouble.
The ego is such that I don't believe the polls.
I'll work it out.
Somebody, somebody had to go to this guy and a lot of these other people and say, you're gone.
And in exchange for what?
There's a rumor floating out there that Chris Dodd is going to be named the Secretary of the Treasury.
And little Timmy Geithner is going to be forced out.
Now, there's a story about Geithner today in Bloomberg that he ought to be fired, which I'll explain to you in just a second.
But so you have Dodd now leaving, and there's got to be something on the other side for him.
This is just too much.
And it's all being done, by the way.
Here's the real, at the end of the day, insult.
It's all being done to preserve Obama.
It's all being done to make sure that Obama has his 60 votes in the Senate so he can get the rest of his stupid agenda, anti-American agenda, implemented.
And so all of these Democrats who have labored for decades in the Senate, who have desired like you can't understand, to have this kind of power.
And after only one year of it, they come to Chris Dodd and say, you got to go for the good of Obama.
This kind of stuff, this kind of stuff is going to rear its ugly head somehow.
The truth will out at some point.
And here's Ben Nelson, by the way.
This is in the Fremont Tribune in Nebraska.
Senator Ben Nelson said Tuesday that it was a mistake for the Obama administration to take on massive health care reforms in 2009 and suggested efforts would have been better spent addressing the economy.
Ben, That's what you did.
We had the stimulus.
You voted for it.
The stimulus.
We had TARP.
You voted for it.
It was all done.
You took care of the economy.
And then you went to work on who you did exactly what you suggest we should have done.
You screwed the taxpayer on the economy first.
And now you're screwing the taxpayer on health care.
That's what you did.
You're following right along with the Obama agenda.
Now, he requested Tuesday's interview with the Fremont Tribune.
I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend time on the economy.
I would have preferred not to be dealing with health care in the midst of everything else.
And I think working on the economy would have been a wiser.
All you had to do was vote no.
All you had to do was vote.
You realize how lame all this is?
Gutless wonders.
Here comes Blanche Lincoln.
I don't think Nebraska should have gotten that deal.
I don't think Ben Nelson.
I don't think we should have done health care at all.
And where?
Where are the Republicans on this?
And talent on loan from God.
El Rushball, the EIB Network.
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I love this online testing.
I hate these people test things for three months and then go live with them and it still doesn't work.
You know, we're just bare naked here.
Test it right in the open with everybody.
That's how you find out what's really wrong with something if there is anything wrong with it.
All right, here's Britt in Thomasville, North Carolina.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Oh, it's ma'am.
It's so good to speak with you, Rush.
I'm so honored that you took my call.
Thank you.
Now, wait a second.
Are you from Thomasville, North Carolina?
Yes.
And your name is Nan, not Britt.
No, ma'am.
I'm a female.
I know.
You said, sir.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Oh, don't worry.
I get that a lot.
But listen, the reason I called Rush is because I'm so glad, so utterly glad that you're bringing up the Republicans and what they are not doing.
You know, they're doing nothing.
They're like, well, I voted no.
You know, that's not enough.
That's not even close to enough.
Well, I know.
They are there in Washington.
They could be fighting.
We're at home.
I've written as many letters as I can write.
You know, I've been to Washington on one of the trips to this protest.
I've done as much as I can do.
We are paying them to fight for us.
Why are they not fighting?
I can't look at, we've been asking this question all year, and I've been referencing this behavior by the Republicans all year, and all I can do is guess at the answers.
I'm going to give you a third one here.
The first two answers I gave you, they've become of Washington, and that becomes a mindset.
And then you become afraid of criticizing Obama because you'll be called a racist and so forth and afraid of offending moderates, which is ridiculous because all these moderates and independents are now running to the Republican Party, and conservatism is the number one ideology by far in the country.
But here's, Britt, this is something that you need to understand, and all of you.
There is a collective mindset among a lot of legislators, I know this is true in state governments, and it has to be true in Washington, of an us against them mindset, meaning us in Congress versus them, the people.
The prevailing opinion among a lot of the legislators, senators and congressmen, is that the people who call are kooks.
The people who write letters are kooks.
They think that people who are working, the real normal people, do not have time to sit around and go to Washington or write letters or send emails or faxes or make phone calls.
They just do.
It is a mindset that they have both parties.
They think people who call are just kooks.
And it leads to an us versus them kind of mentality.
Now, I don't know, I can't say with certainty what percentage of Republicans have this view.
We know that it is rampant throughout the Democrat Party.
I mean, the Democrat Party is, from Obama all the way over to Capitol Hill, the Democrat Party is governing against the will of the people.
And I assure you that the Democrat Party and liberals in general hold average Americans, average people in contempt.
They're not elitists.
They're not smart enough.
They're not bright enough.
They're not sophisticated.
And they do sit around.
And they think most people out there are kooks, especially the ones that call Washington.
Republicans, they have to be some of them who think that.
I mean, this is because it's a legislative mindset.
But the Democrat Party, 100% through and through, holds the American people in contempt and is now governing against their will.
This is another reason why the Republicans ought to just start firing both barrels.
One other thing, folks, I actually believe that the Republican Party has a minority mindset.
Remember, they were out of power for 40 years in the House of Representatives and quite a bit of time in the Senate.
So there's a minority mindset.
They even had the minority mindset when they were the majority.
So there are a lot of things that could be factors, but there's no excuse for it now.
And it's time that it changed.
We've got some great audio soundbites still ahead.
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