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March 3, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:28
March 3, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #3
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It is thick out there, folks.
We have just been delivered the biggest pile of manure.
Yet, with this healthcare speech, practically every line is not true.
Anyway, greetings and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh.
This is the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
The telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address, Ilrushbo at EIBNet.com.
And if you want to comment on this, of course, we'll get to your phone calls in this hour.
The audacity here, everything on healthcare has been said.
Everything's been said.
So the message from the President of the United States is shut up.
Debate over.
Bend over.
Everything's been said.
This after he and his tyrannical party has decided to ignore and overrule the explicit things being said to the American people, which is, hell no, we don't want this.
He just got through saying, has passed in a Senate by 60 votes.
Passed in a House by a simple majority.
Now we've got to do it.
Well, if it passed in both, why don't we have it?
And then he starts this, well, Republicans, Bush got his tax cuts a simple majority.
We need health care with a simple majority.
After we've got eight sound bites of him decrying, criticizing, demanding that the very rule he's going to break never be broken.
It's like I said the other day, folks, you have rules and you have Democrats, and that means you have no rules.
So it'll be interesting to see what kind of fallout there is from this on the part of the American people.
Because this was, I mean, I have never heard health care presented in a rosier fashion.
We're going to reduce costs.
We're going to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars over two decades.
And these are my numbers.
These are the CBO numbers.
They're a referee to determine how much stuff costs here.
It's not true.
It simply isn't true.
He says, if you want to keep your doctor, you keep your plan, you can't know.
I don't know what plan he's got, but every plan that's out there, either one of them, the House or Senate version, we're beating a dead horse here.
How long before we have a doctor's union?
I mean, we, with these kind of people that are in the room, you know, we're on the path to single-payer, folks.
That's what this is.
And everything he said to the contrary is an out and out lie.
Now, while you're out there keeping track of the number of times Nancy Pelosi is going to declare that she can get Obama's health care plan passed, remember, there's a lot of illusion going on out here.
For a year, Pelosi and Reed have both, oh, yeah, we got the votes.
Oh, yeah, we've got them.
And they've never had the votes.
And they're going to be out there doing it again.
Oh, we've got to go reconciliation, though, but we got the votes.
We're going to, we're going to get it done.
While you keep track of the number of times Pelosi says that she can get the votes for Obama's health care plan to get it passed, make sure you take note of the Senate passed jobs bill last week.
More of the same spend as we go and proof positive that the number of ideas in the wheelhouse of this administration is very few.
If the first $800 billion did not affect the unemployment figures, well, the first $800 billion did affect the unemployment numbers.
They went up.
If the unemployment numbers rising as rapidly as they have baffled and surprised the so-called economists, then why would more money thrown at the same problem in the same way work again?
What we need here are new ideas.
We need people and organizations to get them into the arena.
And there is an organization that is a warehouse for ideas.
It's the Heritage Foundation.
And I just want to give you a heads up.
Later today or first thing in the morning, they are going to have the most authentic, detailed, right-on analysis of this drivel that we just heard, and anybody else has.
And that's not to put anybody down.
But the Heritage Foundation, it's where I'm going to go.
Askheritage.org is where I'm going to go because they have right now the brainiacs in that place are tearing down this speech word by word, lie by lie.
And they're going to have the truth of what was really said here today at some point at askheritage.org.
And they're going to have not just an analysis, but they will have genuine free market solutions and ideas on how to create jobs, how to stop this massive healthcare plan.
If you want more than a sneak peek, I mean, you can go to the Heritage Foundation website right now, and you don't need to be a member, but you're not going to be able to see nearly a smidgen, barely a smidgen of what they have there.
You need to join askheritage.org.
Just become a member, $25 donation.
Now is the time.
Greatest bunch of people.
I can't wait for them to break this down.
I mean, if I weren't working on this program, I'd break it down myself.
But obviously, I have my commitments and responsibilities here.
But tomorrow, it's Hiroshima time, folks.
It's Nagasaki.
He thinks he's going nuclear.
Wait till we get to this tomorrow.
He said that.
He said this is not about the next election and the one after that, and it's not about politics.
My plan would stop arbitrary premium.
Oh, price controls.
Yeah, that really has worked.
Price control.
We have Medicare and Medicaid price controls.
That's really worked, hasn't it?
Look at this.
The funny thing, a lot of funny stuff in this speech, too.
We recorded a lot of good Republican ideas from the summit.
Like state grants for tort, medical malpractice reform.
What is that?
What are state grants for medical malpractice reform?
And then he said the next great idea the Republicans had was eliminating fraud and waste.
As though, if the Republicans had proposed it, fraud and waste would still be in his health care plan.
That's a Republican idea.
Sadly, it is, but I mean, that's not a Republican idea.
That's a family budget common sense idea.
And then he had this, in his summary, was talking about all the Republican ideas that have been incorporated.
And then he had to start bashing them.
Republican plan?
Well, only short $3 million.
My plan, $31 million.
And by the way, cut the deficit trillion dollars at the same time.
Numbers won't work.
They don't add up.
We talked about the coffee party yesterday.
This new grassroots offshoot of the Tea Party.
Guess what?
The grassroots organizer of the progressive alternative to the Tea Party's, the Coffee Party, has been exposed as an Obama political operative.
The Tea Party so-called candidate in Nevada for the Senate is an Obama or Harry Reid associate.
Now, if you'd read the, this is newsbusters.org.
If you had read the profiles of the Coffee Party founder, Annabelle Park, in the Washington Post and New York Times, you wouldn't have had a hint as to her extensive political activity in the Obama campaign.
It's a simple internet search, which the Times apparently is incapable of doing, reveals that Annabelle Park organized the Coffee Party for the specific purpose of undermining the Tea Party movement.
And she is a former strategy analyst at the New York Times, one of the organizers and operators of the United for Obama video channel at YouTube.
She's an official part of the campaign.
And she made it sound so well.
It made it sound so moderate until you read the mission statement.
And if you read the mission statement that these people had, it was all about our communal things we have in common.
It was a manifesto of type.
So anyway, the Tea Party is really bugging them, and they're coming up with their phony reaction to it.
Do you realize nothing?
There is no grassroots, genuine, effervescent support for Barack Obama.
Every shred of support is manufactured.
It is organized from this White House website, that union website, or a different White House website, or some phony like this coming along and creating a coffee party.
Nothing is genuine.
There is not one genuine, percolating, grassroots support for Obama.
It all has to be managed.
It all has to be maneuvered.
It has to be inspired, directed, has to be paid for.
It's amazing to watch General Motors is preparing for another management shake-up.
Does that mean we're getting rid of Obama?
Let me read this.
Detroit Free Press.
General Motors is preparing for another shake-up.
Could be announced as soon as when?
Today?
The shake-up comes as industry sales results for February set to be released.
Analysts believe Ford did.
Ford outsold them all.
Oh, and have you heard?
I love this.
General Motors having to recall these 1.3 million little cars, the cobalts and whatever.
They're blaming the same supplier that provides power steering motors to Toyota.
It's so Obama.
All right, your phone calls are coming up after this timeout.
And we're back.
By the way, And sound bites.
Grab number two through five.
Have them ready to go at a moment's notice.
Because really, the most amazing thing, well, it's hard to say what the most amazing thing about the speech was, but he's talking about how Bush got all these major plans done with, he didn't need 60 votes and he didn't have 60 votes to this.
We didn't need 60 votes to that.
We didn't 60 votes.
All these tapes, examples of Obama decrying the notion that we don't need 60 votes in the Senate.
We can't go 50 plus one.
That's not the way to get big reforms done.
These people will, they will just, I mean, Harry Reid last week said, nobody's talking about reconciliation.
And here we just have the president of the United States essentially ordering reconciliation today.
I mean, these people will lie about everything.
They simply don't care.
And one of the reasons why, if you're even interested in why, one of the reasons why is they know that the buddies they have in the media are just going to go right along with them.
They're not going to check this.
They're going to fact check.
They're not going to point out all this is a bunch of garbage.
Anyway, to the phones.
Chris in Erie.
Is that right?
Erie, Colorado.
Great to have you on the program.
Megadittos, Rich.
Thank you.
You know, what has really bothered me about these folks all along is these are the people who think they can tax their way to prosperity.
And this plan they have to tax America and then not spend health care funds until 2014, I guess.
That can't work.
These guys are deficit spenders.
They're going to blow our money before HealthKey even starts.
And, you know, they really, this is the MO of these folks is they think they can spend their way out of trouble.
And they're going to save our money?
You know, this is what I have a problem with.
Nobody is this stupid to think that this is going to end our trouble.
Nobody is this stupid.
Now, they may be this ideologically blind, but nobody's this stupid, particularly after 14 months of utter destruction to the U.S. private sector.
There's just, that's why I maintain this is purposeful.
This is being done for a specific reason, and they're not saying what it is.
I am, but they're not.
This is not about lowering your insurance costs, lowering your premium.
This is not about making sure that you get treated for whatever you want, whenever you want it, and you're not going to have to pay for it.
This is not about improving health care in America, because none of that happens with this.
This is about destruction.
Barack Obama, the most unknown person to be elected president in this country's history.
What do we know about him?
We don't know what his grades were.
I mean, we know who his associates were and so forth.
He's the most, the least vetted candidate that we've ever had.
Now, those of us who no longer pay attention to the drive-bys, we found out as much as we needed to know about this guy.
The first thing we needed to know is he's a liberal.
He was never a centrist.
He's never been a centrist about anything.
He speaks a good centrist gay, but he's never been a unifier.
Barack Obama has never unified anybody.
Never.
He's never brought anybody together.
It's never happened.
And yet, there were enough saps in this country who bought the drivel and thought it would be also nice if it could happen.
But this is not the guy to do it.
We also found out that Barack Obama is a guy who doesn't like this country.
It's the way he's been educated, the way he was brought up.
He thinks this country is almost criminal in the way it's behaved.
Stolen resources from around the world, from other countries that weren't ours.
We have pursued a rich, an unwarranted lifestyle while causing poverty around the world.
Our military has committed murder around the world.
Our CIA has committed murder around the world.
We have militarized space.
We have created the deadliest weapons.
We have stolen the genuine wealth of the true earners of that wealth in this country.
All the rich people in this country are only rich because they stole it from the people who did the real work and should have been paid the real money.
And so, by golly, by God, it's payback time now.
It's payback time.
And everybody who loves this country and who thinks it's the greatest country that's ever been is going to have to get their mind right because we don't deserve that as immoral and as unjust and as imperialistic as we have been.
That's his mindset.
That's the mindset of his preacher.
It's the mindset of Calypso Louis, another friend of his.
It's a mindset of half the union leaders, if not more.
It is the mindset of many of his professors at Harvard and many of your kids' professors at whatever school they're going to.
That's what he's been taught.
And his number one influence was a guy named Frank Marshall Davis, who also hated this country, an avowed communist and Marxist, who hated this country while living in Hawaii.
Go figure.
Suzanne in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I'm so thrilled to talk to you.
Thank you.
My question is, if they manage to get this reconciliation pushed through, other than, you know, of course, probably a lot of Democrats losing their seats, what do you think is going to happen at that point?
And what kind of recourse do we have?
And as citizens, do we have any way to fight this on our own?
At the ballot box first and foremost.
But you mean if this actually gets written into law and signed by Obama, what can we do?
If they get this health care pushed through the way they're talking about it now with this reconciliation process, what do you think is going to be the next phase or the next step?
What do you think happens next?
I actually shudder to think.
I don't think any of these people in Washington understand the depth of anger and outrage over how this is being done and what is being done.
The absolute total in-your-face governance of the president and his party.
I thought Tom Coburn was asked this question by a reporter at Fox the other day.
And the reporter said, look, the Democrats are committing suicide.
Why not let them have this bill?
Let them have it and let them lose big.
And then when you guys get power back in November, just start tearing it apart.
He said, sounds great, but rolling back big pieces of legislation like this is really, really hard.
He didn't say why.
But let me ask you, are you aware of any entitlement that's ever been streamlined, reduced, canceled, or rolled back?
No.
No.
And I'm terrified of what's going to happen if this gets through.
And I have two children, and my husband has been through two jobs in the last couple of years, and we have gone without insurance.
And I know what it's like, and I still am just absolutely furious over this.
It's being shoved down my throat.
And I feel helpless, and I don't know if there's any way to fight it.
I mean, other than voting, but, you know, by November, it may be too late.
Well, we'll see.
I still am not convinced they have the ability to get this done.
I think what we have to do is, because if we adopt that attitude, then there's a natural sense of finality that steps in and the passionate opposition to it recedes.
That can't be allowed to happen.
I don't think they're anywhere near actually getting it done.
Making more sense than anything anybody else out there happens to be saying.
You're waiting on two figures this week.
On Friday, the latest opinion audit numbers of me from the Sullivan group.
We're expecting a drop, by the way, in my accuracy because of my incorrect opinion that the Republicans should not have gone to the Obama Healthcare Summit.
But we'll wait and see.
Well, I'm not going to say the snow had any effect on my opinion audit or my accuracy, but we are also expecting the unemployment numbers to come out on Friday as well.
And we know the snows, apparently they're going to be disastrous because the Council of Economic Advisors guy, Larry Summers, don't even pay any attention to them.
The blizzards.
Nothing about trends in these numbers.
Pay no attention to them.
Okay, Mike in Marion, Iowa.
Great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hey, thanks, Rush.
Megan Dotos from the frozen tundra of East Central Iowa.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, somebody has to be there.
Yeah, it's great.
My question is, what bill are the Democrats talking about reconciling?
Is it H.R. 3200?
Yeah, it's the House bill.
Okay.
Well, that's H.R. 3200.
Yeah, they haven't.
There's not a new one.
Okay.
So that's, but it's, it's, this whole reconciliation, it's a confusing term because it's, the actual term is budget reconciliation, and it is an exception to the 60-vote requirement in the Senate, which is a Senate rule, long-standing Senate rule.
And it is used only for items that have budgetary consequences because the Constitution requires that.
And so they made an exception to the 60-vote rule.
Now, Tom Harkin, senator from Iowa, your blowhard senator told the Politico this afternoon that Senate Democrat leaders, and this is no surprise, have decided to go the reconciliation route.
So here's what he said is going to happen.
The House will first pass the Senate bill after Senate leaders demonstrate to House leaders that they have the votes to pass reconciliation in the Senate.
So as I understand this, the House goes first, and they will, without conference committee, without making any changes in it, they will pass the Senate bill.
Therefore, a new bill will be coming out of the House.
That bill will then go to the Senate where instead of a conference, they will use reconciliation to add things to it that were not in it originally, such as the public option or whatever else the House Democrats want, and to really beef it up.
But they'll do it item by item by item.
And the Republicans have the opportunity to object and demand amendments and so forth, call for parliamentary points of order, parliamentarian rule.
If Biden doesn't like the rule, he can overrule the parliamentarian.
It can take a long time.
It's going to be a bloody process.
And the Republicans, once you free the Republicans from the 60-vote business, then it's a little easier for them to slow it down by just putting thumbtax in the road at every attempt to reconcile the House bill that the Senate engages in.
So essentially, if Harkin has this right, they're essentially going to be reconciling their own bill after the House passes it.
Okay.
Well, I seen Rick Santorum on Fox News last night.
Yeah.
And he had said the only thing the Republicans can really do is just add amendment after amendment after amendment, and then they'll go through their processes of getting rid of them.
But all they can really do is try and slow it down that way.
That's pretty much true.
And I have to tell you something.
I don't normally, I don't normally go off in this kind of a tangent, but I just, so many D.C. pundits over the past three months, including some of the Fox Oil stars, poo-pooed all this talk of reconciliation.
He'll never do reconciliation.
They'll never do that.
That's just a bunch of talk radio lingo.
They'll never do reconciliation.
And here we are.
The door has just been opened to reconciliation.
Look, I hope I have not confused you more with this explanation.
Well, no, I'm not confused.
I was just curious because the reconciliation process is through the Senate.
So that means they have to have a bill to do that.
They've already passed their one Senate bill that they have.
So then it has to be H.R. 3200.
That's the one that they're going to do.
And then, well, no, that may not be the case.
And I'm going to double check this because I'm just going on what Harkin said here to the Politico.
The House will first pass the Senate bill.
Okay.
Which, if, again, if I'm reading that right, H.R. 3200 is history.
The Senate bill becomes the House bill.
That new House bill, which is just the original Senate bill, then goes back to the Senate, and then they start adding all the dirt to it that the House bill had, but they couldn't pass it.
With a conference committee, they couldn't get—the Democrats couldn't agree on those two bills.
They had a House bill, Senate bill, 3200, as you're saying, and whatever the Senate bill number was.
And the Republicans couldn't stop either one up until Scott Brown came along.
They couldn't agree on a lot of this.
That's why they're going reconciliation.
So there's one minor potential pratfall here, and that is the level of distrust that exists between the Democrats and the House and the Senate.
As I said earlier, neither one, I mean, the House went first on cap and trade, the House went first on this, and they took all the heat because they're the ones that put the communism in the bill.
Let me rephrase that.
They're the ones that intensified and amplified the communism in the bill.
And the Senate said, oh, gee, we can't, we're not going to get that's that's when you had Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson.
That got a public option.
Okay, okay.
How about a cornhusker kickback for your vote?
Oh, okay.
And Mary, how about a new Louisiana purchase?
We'll exempt you from all of our punitive Medicare expenses.
Louisiana and Nebraska will have to pay them.
Okay, I'll take it.
And Schwarzenegger says, well, but to me.
And they said, screw you, you're a Republican in name only.
So that's the history of this is that you didn't have two bills that could be reconciled or conferenced in the normal procedure.
And after they were put together, you would not get 60 votes on that final bill in the Senate.
That's why we're here.
And then when Scott Brown won the election, buy-by 60 votes.
So no longer 60 votes ceased to be a factor because they didn't have them.
I mean, the real history of this, the American people, through their elected representatives in election after election after election and vote after vote after vote, have rejected this every which way possible.
But that doesn't mean anything to our young, unqualified president.
He wants this.
And despite the fact that he has said we should never change Senate rules for policy legislation, never.
That's tearing at the fabric of what the founders said.
Here he is doing it today.
So a brief history.
Just to help maybe, this is what we do here is we make the complex understandable.
So the House passed a health care bill that had every, every, every destructive element Obama wanted in it.
You lose your insurance coverage, public option, buy-by insurance companies on the private single payer.
It was all there.
The Senate tried to do the same thing.
Problem was Ben Nelson, Mary Landry, Blanche Lincoln, a couple others, and Olympias knows that I'm not going for public option.
There's no way I'm voting for that.
So they couldn't get 60 votes in the Senate for an identical House bill.
So they got a different bill, a watered down version of the Senate bill.
Time to compromise.
Time to go to the conference committee.
Big time arguments.
Wouldn't happen.
Even if they came to some sort of agreement, they still have to go back to the Senate and get 60 votes again on the conferenced bill with a compromise between the two.
And again, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson and Mary Landry said, no, we're not going public option.
And it stalled and it stalled, and then Scott Brown was elected.
And that takes 60 votes off the table.
So they can't use normal rules.
They were stopped dead in their tracks.
It was finished.
They were crying, oh no, we lose it for another 10 years.
We can't go back to it.
Obama said, oh, we're going to do it.
So they started talking about reconciliation while denying they were talking about reconciliation and all the immediate pundits in Washington.
No, they'll never do reconciliation.
So what's going to happen now is the Senate bill that is watered down at this point, the Senate bill that does not have the public, the Senate bill doesn't have half of what Obama said today.
Now, it's key to what Obama said in his speech today has never passed a joint session of Congress, meaning a Senate-House conference compromise.
It has never passed.
It couldn't get 60 votes.
That's the whole reason we're at this stage.
So here's the trick.
The House has got to trust the Senate.
The House will pass the Senate bill.
They'll send it over there as though there's no, Nancy Pelosi is going to rubber stamp it.
It doesn't have public option in it, ostensibly.
It doesn't have all these things in it.
They may strip out the cornhusker kickback, but I think Landry's going to get her deal still.
So in essence, what is the Senate bill will become the House bill.
Then that bill goes over to the Senate and the reconciliation process where only 51 votes per amendment, per ad, whatever, are necessary to pass it in a clear violation of Senate rules.
And that's, so when you hear that the House bill is going to be reconciled, it's actually the original Senate bill sent over there that they rubber stamp.
I'm long here in this segment.
I have to take a break.
I know it's tough because you love learning and you like the sound of my voice more than I do.
But I have to take a brief time out.
We'll be back and continue after this.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network.
Man, oh, man, oh, man.
New York Congressman Eric Massa, a Democrat, will not seek re-election after only one term in orifice.
Literally.
According to several House aides on both sides of the aisle, the House Ethics Committee has been informed of allegations that Representative Eric Massa, Democrat New York, who is married with two children, sexually harassed a male staffer.
He's a 20-year Navy veteran, was elected to Orifice last November, serves on the Agriculture Armed Services and Homeland Security Committee.
So I wonder if he's going to, could this be one less vote for Pelosi?
I don't know.
Doubt it.
They'll hang in there.
Here's Adam in Shinston, West Virginia.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Oh, Rush.
Did those from Mountaineer Country?
Thank you, sir.
I was just wondering what your thoughts were on if the Democrats push reconciliation this week, if you think that the Republicans could repeal it in the fall if they gain back both houses, since the effects don't take effect till 2016.
Well, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, interesting question.
There are two implementation dates.
The implementation of all of the new tax increases and all of the new regulations start immediately.
The so-called benefits, the spending, doesn't start for four years or so, or five.
And that's a budget gimmick for Obama and his buddies to be able to say it comes in under a trillion dollars.
So basically, you're going to have 10 years of taxes and six years of spending or five, whatever it is.
But still, rolling it back, repealing it, Tom Corbyn, I can only tell you what Corbyn said.
I'm going to be talking to some of these guys in the coming days because a club for growth meeting down here this week, a bunch of these guys are going to be in town, and I have some meetings set up.
I'm going to find out what the strategy is.
And I'm going to find out exactly what's involved because I've never seen it happen.
I've never seen, by definition, this is an entitlement, and by definition, an entitlement can't be touched.
By definition, we can't roll back Social Security.
We can't roll back Medicare Medicaid.
That's when you hear that 60% of the federal budget is entitlement spending.
It means there can never be budget cuts in that.
It's the discretionary side, which is becoming less and less and less of the budget.
And this is just another one of these entitlements.
So, anyway, about healthcare, I owe you another mention of Zycam, ladies and gentlemen.
And I want to stress once more that my favorite delivery system for this, I'm close to calling it a miracle product, is the new oral spray.
It serves as a breath spray, but it's also the fastest, easiest way, at least for me, to get the medication working fast.
You just spray it four times in your mouth, follow the directions.
It's easy to do.
Everybody knows how to open their mouth.
And you shoot it in there, spray it in there three times, four times, every three hours.
The minute you think you're coming down with a cold, the moment.
If you wait a day, it may not work.
It's got to be the minute, first symptom you think you have.
Even if it's not, if you're wrong, it's no big deal because the stuff won't hurt you.
But if you do it, it will reduce the severity and the symptoms will not be nearly as bad, won't slow you down.
The stuff works.
And I continue to get testimonials on this at all times.
It's great to have Zycam as a sponsor on this program because it's the best thing you can say about a sponsored product is it works.
Zycam works.
If you don't have any, get some.
We're still in cold season.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Sullivan Group, the opinion auditing firm in Sacramento, just sent me an email.
They are suspending the audit of my opinions for the month of February, given the way Obama is using that summit in his hype.
The Sullivan Group is of the opinion I could still end up being right on my opinion that the Republicans should not have gone.
So the audit of my opinions for the month of February has been suspended.
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