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March 10, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:52
March 10, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Yeah, they are.
Snerdley, they are going to vote on.
We're waiting on the vote.
I'm just back there watching C-SPAN.
They're having three hours of debate, general debate in the House on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
I didn't know this was going on, and they're going to be voting on it soon.
And Snerdley said, well, but Cap and Trade, don't these people get it?
Cap and Trey.
Snerdley, you're not listening.
They know they've got till January.
They have actually not it.
They've got until November to get all this stuff done.
Greetings and welcome back, my friends.
Great to have you here.
It's El Rushball and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
All right, I knew I should have done it.
People, if you can't get it on iTunes, why are you telling us about it?
Well, you can get it.
I mean, I had to get the CD from Amazon.
Here.
Waldo de los Rios.
There's three CDs I found with a tune on it.
This is Grandes Exitos.
But he's got the greatest hits.
This guy's Argentinian, and it's from the early 70s.
And I remember playing this.
I always love classical music, but this is pop version of it.
And people say, what are you grooving to in there?
And it's because I'm playing the air violin here sometimes.
So, we have, since we last spoke, we have taken great, just a couple patch chords here, but we have enabled my iTunes to be able to be broadcast on the program.
Now, when we finish this, Brian, you're going to disconnect that because it's actually my entire computer output here that we're going to be broadcasting for you here.
So you're going to disconnect that.
All right, so let me reach back here.
Now, the thing goes, 425, I'm going to play the whole thing.
But I'll play enough of it so you understand what I meant when I said it just makes you happy listening to it.
And again, it's a pop version of a classical, a great classical, shall we say, tune.
Classical work, yes.
Fine, fine work.
Mozart Symphony 40 G minor with Waldo de los Rios.
One moment, I forgot to explain something, folks.
I'll re-cue this.
If it sounds, well, I don't know, for those of you listening on AM, this is going to really thump at you.
Because I had Brian record this on a CD through the flamethrower.
I grew up in the days of AM-only radio with convertibles and so forth.
And Motown and these people, they compressed.
They compressed the music.
The volume level at every point in the song is the same.
Low volume is sucked up.
And you can hear if a great compressor is in action, you can hear the suck-up.
You can actually hear it brought down.
So when songs fade out, the fade out, it just stops because the compressor keeps it up.
So this, I just happen to like listening to music that way.
Now, the audiophile, like every engineer I've ever worked for, it's distortion.
You're just distorting.
I don't care if it's distortion.
I happen to like it.
Shut up.
You're telling me my preference is somehow not real because it's not pure.
But I happen to love compression.
So here, let me go back to the beginning of this thing.
We got 14 seconds of it.
There we go.
And I'm not interrupted much.
Waldo de los Rios and Mozart Symphony 40 in G minor.
Now, the bad thing about playing that for you is if you make an effort to go out and get the CD, it won't sound that way to you because you do not have a flamethrower to play it through.
And one thing compression does, it probably almost doubles the volume.
One of the reasons compression was used back in the old AM top 40 jock days was every station wanted to be the loudest on the dial as you were tuning through it because it was the loudness that attracted you.
And so some stations, I mean, just zap that compression at you.
And I just, I always always loved it.
And that's why I've never really liked music on FM, because it's not nearly as compressed because the engineers don't want to start it.
And you'd probably hear the distortion more on FM.
But nevertheless, that's Waldo de los Rios.
That's what I'm grooving to do.
Now get this, Nancy Pelosi.
Just hot off the press here from thehill.com.
Pelosi says House has votes for health care if vote were held today.
In an interview with Bloomberg and PBS host Charlie Rose, who's still trying to figure out who Obama is, Pelosi hinted that she could pass health care plans to the House if they were brought up this week.
Yes, she said, when asked if she believed the House would end up having the votes if we took it up today.
Yeah.
Well, then vote today.
Vote today.
They don't have the votes.
Ladies and gentlemen, do you remember the incident on Chris Matthews' show on Sunday?
You probably didn't see it, but we aired it for you.
Matthews was asking Rather, they were talking about what they thought Obama's big problem was, and Rather said, well, you know, no leadership here.
Can't get anything done.
Taking all this time.
It's a bad impression he's leaving.
He's giving the impression that Republicans are going to say, this guy is so bad he couldn't sell watermelons on the side of the road if a state trooper was stopping traffic for him.
Matthews going, oh, no, Dan.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Then we discovered what happened after the program, in case Matthews ever invited Rather back.
Well, that was Matthews and Rather talking after the show on Sunday.
Today, Rather has posted a piece at the Huffington Puffington Post entitled Watermelons Washington and what we call news today.
And he starts it this way.
I must confess until recently, I had no idea what Twitter was.
Even now, I'm not completely sure how it's best used.
When I want to post something, the younger, more tech-savvy people in my office help me out.
But I do know this.
If you search Twitter for Dan Rather over the past few days, you probably can guess why I feel the need to write this column.
It started this past Sunday when I appeared on TV, Chris Matthews.
I've known and respected Chris for many years.
I enjoyed doing his show.
I take the train down from my home in New York to Washington.
As I approach Union Station, my thoughts often turn to the years that I spent covering the Johnson and Nixon White House.
You see where this is going.
It was a turbulent time for the country, a formative period for me as a reporter and a young father.
The Washington at that time was a far different place.
Some ways it was better.
Less politically rancorous, more collegial.
Many ways, the country it represented was much worse.
African Americans were still very much second-class citizens.
Women held a few positions of power.
We smoked more.
We polluted our environment more.
No, Dan, no, no, no, that's a faux pas.
I'm surprised they let that go.
We're polluting now like we never have, Dan.
That's, yeah, okay.
Accepted social mores that anyone who had seen Mad Men knows are embarrassingly outdated.
Meaning drinking in the office, betting the secretary, that son of stuff.
Dan, that stuff's still going on, too.
The news media, snerdly, how do I know?
Because I know human nature.
The news media was also different.
So different, in fact, that I won't even try to enumerate all the changes.
So you can see where this is headed.
Where do you think it's headed?
No.
No, he's saying he was one of the early participants in the civil rights movement.
All of this is the backdrop for what I said on the Matthews show.
I was talking about Obama and healthcare, and I used the analogy of selling watermelons with the side of the road.
It's an expression that stretches to my boyhood roots in Southeast Texas, where country highways were lined with stands manned by sellers of all races.
Now, of course, watermelons have become a stereotype for African Americans.
And so my analogy entered a charged environment.
I'm sorry people took offense, but anybody who knows me personally, Dan, this doesn't work for most people.
We'll see if it works for you.
Anybody who knows me personally or knows my professional career would know that race was not on my mind.
Reporting on the injustices of race was part of the reason I became a reporter.
I grew up in segregated Texas, the same side of the tracks as the African-American community at the time.
Next, he's going to tell us I haven't read this whole thing and he sold watermelons.
Let's see.
At the time, enlightened people called them Negroes.
Many people call them much worse.
When I covered the civil rights movement, I saw sheer hatred in ways I still haunt and shock me.
For doing my small part in reporting on the South in the 60s, I was called a traitor to my roots and other names not fit for print.
I was threatened with all of this.
All of this.
This just goes to show you what a politically correct touch.
Just say, I wasn't talking about that and you know it.
Just say, lighten up.
I wasn't talking about that and everybody knows it.
No, we got 1,500 words here.
What saddens me is what this experience has made all too clear.
Much of what we call news isn't.
Much of what we tweet or post or chat away at under the guise of news.
What's that got to do with you saying Obama couldn't sell watermelons on the side of the road if a state trooper stopped the traffic for it?
Okay, we're back.
It's Rush Lindbaugh.
This is the EIB network.
And I predicted this to you.
I predicted this to you, and it's starting to happen now.
This is CNBC.com from yesterday afternoon.
The slush fund is running out.
Saved jobs were not really saved.
They were delayed mass firings.
There's some really great stuff here.
Well, it's not great stuff, but I mean, I predicted it all.
And another reason why my accuracy rating may unexpectedly jump when it finally comes out, it's states, cities likely to slash jobs as stimulus dwindles.
All of this is so predictable.
The worst looks to be over for private sector unemployment, but it may be just beginning for state and local government workers.
State and local government payrolls typically don't decline much until a year after the beginning of a recession because budgets are already in place and fairly inflexible.
As a result, payrolls were stable in 2008 and a good part of 2009, but not anymore.
Revenue-starved states are taking more drastic steps to balance budgets.
This is completely unprecedented as a crisis, said Ethan Pollock of the Economic Policy Institute.
The budget cuts are going to get more and more severe.
And the main trigger will be the winding down of the Massive America Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the slush fund, the porculus bill.
They're running out of the money.
All the money was to delay this.
All that money was not saved jobs.
It was just delayed layoffs, delayed layoffs, and mass firings.
Here's Rob and Glenn Covid, Long Island.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Very well, sir.
Thank you.
You know, I just wanted to share some thoughts with you in America as someone who is doing health care day in, day out, every day for the last 20 years here in New York.
And I'm really saddened just to hear the kind of things that they're talking about where there's really very little creativity in the solutions, where we could have tremendous changes in healthcare with respect to pre-existing conditions across the country.
But I think it's really important that you, as your status, could drill down as to what kind of benefits they're offering.
And the point I want to make to America is that you can't offer a third-party system with these dollar-one benefits and expect any kind of clenching of the cost curve.
I spent the first eight years of my career inside a TPA where before they linked with networks where you paid co-payments, you paid cash.
And as soon as they contracted with these networks where suddenly the employee could just say, well, you know, I'll just pay $15.
We saw some of the stupidest claims that if you had to pay some money out of your pocket, you know, they wouldn't have been done.
There's a study at Mount Sinai that if you watch your weight, you exercise, you don't smoke, you watch your blood pressure.
You're going to die someday.
No, you've reduced your chance of a heart attack over a given 10-year period by 99%.
Do you know if you're hurt in a car accident, no health plan pays for you?
Do you know if you're hurting the job at workers' comp?
No health plan's paying for you.
And at a time now of epic budget crunches across the country, I'm telling you that when U.S. Healthcare and Oxford came to New York in 1993, the promise was, we're going to give you physicals, we're going to keep the rates low, and everyone's going to stay healthy because we're going to find the cancers ahead of time.
The total opposite happened.
Rates went up 600%.
Why?
Because people had no invitation to want to be consumer-oriented.
And the doctors realized, hey, my business has now morphed into a volume practice.
And one of the things I'd like to talk to you about or just put out there is that I believe, you know, in New York we have boar's head, the meat menu with the delicatessens.
I believe that if you go to a neurologist's office, and he has an ownership interest in a diagnostic facility, he's got to clearly display that.
But also, these plans should not be covering forms of radiology or technology where diagnostic studies, where these prices should be publicly showed and people should start to...
Well, the reason, look, I think I get your point.
You go to a deli, you know you're buying boar's head.
You go to the doctor, you don't know what you're getting because you're not paying for it.
There's no relationship.
This has been a bone of contention of mine for the long.
This is what's primarily wrong with our health care system.
And that is the patient and the provider and the service have no financial relationship to each other at all.
The patient's ability to pay is not a factor in the pricing.
And so the market's been blown up to smithereens here, and none of it makes any sense.
And that's why there's such a sense of entitlement to healthcare on the part of many, many people.
And we are back.
It's Rush Limbaugh, and this is the EIB network, Talents on Loan from God.
Okay, we got to get some audio sunlights in here, too.
They have been patiently waiting.
We promised them we'd play them, and we haven't gotten to too many of them.
This is just funny.
This is yesterday afternoon or last night, a montage of a bunch of media people, all pure propagandists.
Every one of these people said what you're going to hear them say after I said specifically I was not moving.
I was simply leaving the country for health care if Obamacare passes and then coming back.
Not moving.
I said that before all these people say this.
Rush Limbaugh threatening to leave our country for good.
Rush Limbaugh vowing to leave the country if Democrats manage to pass their health care reform bill.
Rush Limbaugh, now he's threatening to do something if the president succeeds with his health care reform.
He's threatening to leave the country.
I definitely look forward to Rush Limbaugh leaving the country.
Do you know that?
Rush Limbaugh said that if the health care bill passes, he's going to leave the country.
Rush Limbaugh says that if healthcare reform passes, he will leave the country.
Radio host Rush Lumbaugh says he will leave the United States if healthcare reform passes.
Rush Limbaugh has said that if healthcare goes through in the country, he is moving out of the country.
Hey, hello, good news.
Hello?
Hello, Maud.
That's Maud.
No, that's actually Joy Behar.
I heard a great line about Joy Behar.
I could not repeat the joke.
I couldn't repeat it on this show.
I don't care how much cajoling.
I cannot do it because it is a, it is, it's, it's a, oh, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's got a dirty, it's got, it's, it's so hilarious, but I couldn't dare tell it on this show.
I'm, uh, no, it's not, no, it's not, it's not coyote.
No, no, no, it's none of that.
It's none of that.
It's, it's, I shouldn't have said this because there's no way.
You're not going to cajole me in the top of the joke.
I could not possibly tell the joke.
Could not possibly.
I'll tell you in a commercial break.
Could I give you one word where you could reconstruct the joke?
One key word.
Let's see.
Penis.
I'm sorry, it's not much help.
They're at work trying to diagram a joke involving Joy Behar and Penis.
Well, not if it's not a tough one if you have a vivid imagination.
Let's see.
Let's see.
Oh, let's do soundbites four, five, and six.
Because Larry King Live has become a total train wreck.
It is a total train.
And, you know, people sometimes go to train tracks to watch a train wreck.
They go to auto races to watch a track, a race, a crash.
And here we've got Larry King every night with one.
He had Eric Massa on last night, and they had this exchange about Ram Emmanuel.
You're both in a gym, right?
No women are there.
You were nude too, right?
He's walking around nude.
The fact that he's nude is immaterial.
He's angry at you because you're going to vote against his president's bill.
That sounds like a tough chief of staff getting angry at one of the members of his own party who's going against him.
The fact that he didn't have clothes on and you were coming out of a shower is immaterial.
Well, it's just terribly awkward.
It's terribly awkward.
When was the last time you had a political argument with a naked man?
It just doesn't work well.
Well, then that's my point.
Okay, and this, they kept heading on down the tracks.
By the way, I owe Ron an apology.
I went over the top.
I don't think he'd strap his children to the front of a locomotive.
He'd strap my children to the front of a locomotive.
So King says, well, you said, quote, not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe.
And then four guys jumped on top of me.
So you did grope somebody, right?
This is Larry King alive last night.
So you did grope somebody, right?
Larry, when you grab someone and you're wrestling, I don't know how to describe that word.
So if that's the word that you want to have an entire debate about, then I can't stop it.
No, I'm just asking the question.
You said you groped.
Yeah, I gropeed it.
A lot of people associate groping with sexual.
Well, it wasn't sexual.
Period.
What Massa should have said is, well, to each his own, Larry.
All right, so here, now, I think the next bite, just see if you agree with me that the train comes off the tracks here.
We have to ask it, are you gay?
Here's that answer.
I'm not going to answer that.
In year 2010, why don't you ask my wife?
Ask my friends.
Ask the 10,000 sailors I serve with in the Navy.
No.
I'm not going to answer that.
It's an insult.
I'm going to drop that.
This ain't.
Larry?
I didn't mean it to insult you.
Not me.
It insults every gay American to somehow classifies people.
Why would anybody even ask that question?
You said you groped someone who was a male.
And Larry, and I explained what that was three times.
Come on now.
We're just asking to set the record straight.
I'm not offending gay.
These are not trying to offend, certainly would not offend the gay community or meaning to.
Of course not.
What's wrong with being gay?
So tomorrow night, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Here on Larry, it is.
Everybody rushed in to have this kook on him.
It was funny.
So let's just keep going.
Last night, Anderson Cooper 360 had David Rodham Gergen on there.
Cooper said, What do you make of a whole tickles fight?
This is CNN with about 25,000 viewers.
I don't know whether this fellow needs media help or mental help.
Probably both.
I think he's sort of a mess.
In some ways, he's become a political corpse.
The best thing we can do is put a sheet over him and move on.
He does not have the goods and making this wild charge about the Democrats forcing him out.
Is it political corpse or political core?
It depends on who's pronouncing the word, I guess.
So they found Pelosi last night on Charlie Rose, and Charlie said, He's now become the darling of the conservative talk radio people, Rush Limbaugh.
No, no, Charlie.
This is another thing that took on a life of its own.
But anyway, that's why they had him on because they thought that I was supporting this guy.
Anyway, here's what Pelosi said.
So what?
I mean, the point is, this is a very sick person.
He has been diagnosed with cancer.
Perhaps his judgment is impaired because of the ethical issues that have arisen, and he is no longer in the Congress.
Poor baby.
Poor baby.
Sometimes we really exaggerate our own importance in a lot of these things.
Poor baby.
Poor baby.
Speaker of the house, Larry King.
Are you gay?
Oh, because you said you groped a guy.
I'm not saying you're gay.
You did.
Really, Ron was nigger.
What did that look like?
All right, grab some at 21.
So we got Dan Rather.
We got Dan Rather out there saying, back in the old, good old days when we were reporting on civil rights and I was able to make stuff up and nobody was able to prove it I was making it up.
Everybody knew I wasn't a racist.
But now Obama's so bad that he couldn't sell watermelons side of a road.
A state trooper was stopping traffic for him.
Now, Rather worked where he worked at CBS.
So this morning on the CBS early show, 21 and 20, just sound like 21.
The CBS early show today, Harry Smith had a colonoscopy live on camera.
They did this after the story on what's his face, MASA claiming that Emmanuel walked into the gym shower with no clothes on.
So they went from the nude conversation about the health bill here to colonoscopy on camera.
And during the procedure, we have a portion of this that's Katie Couric is in there offering encouragement.
And Dr. Mark Prochapin, the doctor performing the procedure.
Now, this is the network of Murrow and Cronkite now airing colonoscopies, and they wonder why nobody is watching.
You have apparently a very long colon.
By the way, I just want to point out I'm wearing my splash shield because I was told I was going to be in the splash zone and I could have gone all day without them right now.
Sorry about that, Katie.
Anyway.
So that is the CBS evening news anchor Katie Couric describing being in the splash zone of a colonoscopy at breakfast time on the CBS morning news after a story on Eric Massey and Ram Emmanuel nude there in the house gym.
We also learned Harry Smith's colon is very long and that Katie could have gone all day without knowing she was in the splash zone.
Now, Grab Sunbite 20.
Is Harry gay?
I don't know if Harry Smith's gay.
does it matter?
Now oh Larry King wants to know.
Well no I don't think so.
But I wouldn't know.
I wouldn't care.
Now let's go to last night Joy Behar show.
Have you figured out the joke yet you guys you figured out the Joy Behar joke?
Well that's the point if you but if you if you find a way to make that connection You'll find yourself on the floor laughing yourself silly.
Okay, now last night who'd have had on there Joy Behar had sex columnist Dan Savage and political correspondent Nia Malika Henderson about Dan Rather and the watermelon comment.
Of all the fruits to choose, why would he choose watermelon?
There's an orange, there's a cantaloupe, any other fruit.
Why that?
If you drive through Texas in the summer, it is watermelon that is sold by the side of the road.
Dan Rather is almost 80 years old, and you can hear Chris Matthews and the other guests on that show jumping in to interrupt him like you would to interrupt great grandpa at Thanksgiving.
I don't think Dan Rather is a closet race.
So it's a ratherism.
Yeah, that's what it seems like.
I'm from South Carolina and yeah, people do sell watermelons on the side of the road.
Yeah, but there aren't news anchors who talk about Obama being unable to, even if a state trooper was stopping traffic for him.
But nevertheless, this is what passes.
Now, for what goes on in prime time in what is called the mainstream media, colonoscopies, splash zones.
Why couldn't he have chosen another fruit?
When she said that, I didn't know if she was talking.
Well, we'll be back.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed.
I am Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity, keeping a straight face during all this.
Okay.
Sophisticated Minnesota fraud ring has global tendencies.
Investigators say that members steal ID, credit card, and ATM data from banks and trash cans.
This is the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Joint State and Federal Task Force has been quietly targeting, and this just a couple days ago, quietly targeting what investigators say is a sophisticated organized crime ring in the Twin Cities with about 200 members who have allegedly stolen identities, taken over bank and credit card accounts, distributed counterfeit checks and currency, and defrauded businesses and banks nationwide.
The ring recruits members on social networking sites like Facebook.
They buy stolen information from employees of check caching services and internet data brokers.
They've even sent trusted ring members to college and business schools to qualify them for jobs in financial institutions or other targeted businesses.
And they say this looks like it could be one of the biggest cases of its type in the country.
This stuff is happening.
It is springing up all over.
And this ring is rooted in West Africa and Eastern Europe.
And taking down this bunch could disrupt 30 to 40% of the fraudulent check activity in the Twin Cities.
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Lifelock membership, just by mentioning Bill Rushbo or Rush.
Don't confuse them.
Here's the offer code Rush, LifeLock 800-440-4833 Ron in Cincinnati.
Hello, sir.
Hi, Rush.
A sincere pleasure.
Thank you.
Although following splash zone and colonoscopy is going to be a tough act to follow.
Well, we gave you a couple minutes break.
There you go.
Just a quick point.
President Obama talked quantitatively about the number of people that die every day.
I think he mentioned 124 people.
And as your previous caller mentioned, that may not be a proper conclusion, but let's use it just for the sake of argument.
I did a little research and found out that, unfortunately, in this country, many people die as a result of the medical care they do receive, and most of them being insured.
There are some 80,000 deaths per year just due to infections in hospitals.
I always wonder if maybe we can shift the discussion from quantitative to qualitative and maybe talk about the things that we need to improve beyond the number of people that may be uninsured, and that is tort reform and perhaps a critical examination of the way that we deliver health care.
This is a key point.
None of it is addressed in any Obamacare proposal.
All they're talking, and they're addressing things like the uninsured for compassion, claiming they're going to lower costs, but nobody believes that's going to happen.
But their very act of passing this is going to retard the improvements you talk about.
It's going to penalize and punish research and development in drugs.
It's going to stop medical progress and advancement in hospitals treatment dead in its tracks.
Exactly.
Well, richest country in the world, Rush, and we have hundreds of thousands of people.
And I hope that's not an exaggeration, but my source indicates hundreds of thousands of people dying every year unnecessarily.
So I hope he does address the qualitative issues as well as the 124 people and the poor souls that die each, that he indicated is dying each day from the lack of health care.
It's a very tough thing to prove one way or another.
Because of the lack of insurance, it's bogus anyway, because everybody gets treated at the emergency room.
There's nobody dying because they don't have insurance, not in this country.
The whole thing is bogus.
But the problem here, and I'm not sweeping your point off the table, but Obama's proposal is not about qualitative health care.
It's not about health care.
And it really isn't about insurance other than destroying private sector insurance.
Obama's health care proposal is not about health care.
It's about nationalizing $2.5 trillion of the U.S. private sector and putting the government in charge of it and then being able to regulate almost every aspect of life possible.
It is an attempt to overthrow a portion of the U.S. private sector, pure and simple.
I think I finally illustrated compression.
People have found Waldo de Los Rios, Mozart 40G miner, online, and they played it.
My brother was one of them.
It sounds nothing like the version you play.
It's the same version.
I just put it through the flamethrower.
So people, what's a flamethrower?
It's a product made by APHEX.
It's a piece of broadcast equipment.
You can't get this at home.
Just like you shouldn't try to do this program at home, you can't get an APHEX flamethrower.
Even if you could, you wouldn't know how to put it into your system.
It's a piece of broadcast equipment.
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