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Aug. 9, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
August 9, 2010, Monday, Hour #2
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Welcome back.
Well, as we speak, the President of the United States is winging his way in Air Force One towards Austin, Texas.
It's going to be a grand and glorious sight when the plane pulls in at Bergstrom.
President plane comes to a stop.
The stairs are rolled up.
The door opens.
The president emerges from the plane and begins to walk down the steps.
And they're waiting for him at the bottom of the steps at the beginning of a two-stop visit to Texas for a fundraising event for the Democratic National Committee.
There at the bottom of the steps will be Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry with a howdy, Mr. President.
May I have a minute to talk to you about what a lousy job you're doing on border security.
And where, you might ask, where might you ask, is the Democratic candidate for governor?
Do you think that he'd be waiting there at the bottom of the steps to greet the president's arrival, get in the limo and ride to the event with him, and then ride on Air Force One to Dallas and attend the event there in Dallas at which money is being raised for the Democratic National Committee?
Well, if you bet that, you would have lost your ranch, Bubba.
You'd be out.
Because Bill White, the Democrat candidate for governor of Texas, he is nowhere to be found.
He is out there in West Texas, about as far away from President Obama as you can get.
He is about as far from an airplane, a bus station, a train station, an automobile rental agency, even a corral.
He's not going to be able to get on a horse and get there in time to greet the President of the United States.
And why?
Because Bill White wants to win, and he knows being next to Barack Obama in Austin, even in Austin, Texas, is going to be like, you know, getting the political Ebola plague.
So he's going to be as far away as he possibly can be.
You know, not only is he not going to be there, but a couple of months ago, he went out of his way to insult President Obama by dismissing him, saying, quote, I was in the oil and gas business when he was a community organizer.
Ain't it great to come to Texas, Mr. President?
Know that you've got such staunch friends as that.
I mean, this is the Democratic nominee for governor in the second biggest state of the union.
And what is he doing?
He is dissing you, man.
He is saying, Mr. President Obama, don't be coming here.
Come and get the gators, but don't expect me to be there when you collect the moolah.
And Governor Perry is doing a very smart thing by greeting graciously the President of the United States as he comes to the state, thereby dramatizing the unwillingness of the Democratic nominee to be seen in the same county, the same region of the state as the president, and also doing a wonderful job of getting a moment that the president cannot avoid at which the governor of Texas can say, you know what, you're doing a lousy job on the border and these 1,200 National Guardsmen that you're sending the border,
which are less than a quarter of what Bush sent down, they're inadequate, particularly here in Texas.
Do more, Mr. President.
So anyway, we'll be talking more in politics here later in the hour, but I thought I just, you know, just to mark the moment, the special moment when Air Force One is on final approach to my hometown of Austin, Texas, and the president is going to have a special greeting and a special disc greeting from the Democratic nominee for governor, Bill White.
What a man of courage.
I'd love to be in a foxhole in a fight with Bill White.
That's a man you want to be able to count on.
Anyway, we were talking last hour about the bad stimulus bill they passed last year.
Did you know they're about ready to pass stimulus two?
Pelosi has called the House of Representatives back from their August recess, their August vacation, and she's got them coming to town and they're going to vote and they're going to vote on that Senate bill that was passed last week, stimulus two, two, two, two.
After all, we did such a bang-up job with that first stimulus bill.
Why not top it off with a second one?
Let's take a few minutes, though, and look at what happened here.
It started out $10 billion for teachers.
Oh, unless we pass this bill, they said in the Senate, we're going to have to furlough teachers because without this $10 billion of federal taxpayer dollars, we're going to have to let some teachers go.
And wouldn't that be terrible just as we're getting ready for the little school children to go back to school to have to let those $10 billion worth of teachers go?
So we've got to find $10 billion to do that.
Now, first of all, that's a little bit strange, don't you think?
After all, the budgets of state and local governments in 2008 was $826.1 billion.
$826 billion.
Don't you think they could just find over 1% savings somewhere else in the government if state and local government put their brains to it?
I mean, don't we have all this stuff going on right now?
I mean, in Milwaukee, the teachers union wants to be able to have coverage for Viagra.
You know, in New Jersey, we've got teachers who are pounding the table.
They get their health benefits for life and they don't have to contribute anything.
And the governor of New Jersey is wisely saying you ought to put up at least a percent and a half of your salary for your benefits.
I mean, can't they find ways creatively to do this if teachers are all that important?
But you know what?
The secret is it's not really teachers.
The teachers are an excuse.
We got this last week when Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said, Oh, we've got to pass this bill in order to save the teachers and the firemen.
Now, of course, there's no money in here for firemen, but she sort of let loose the secret, which is the teachers are not what it's about.
It's about government employees, and they're going to put the most attractive ones out there, the teachers and the police and the fire, in order to tug at our heartstrings and get the American Congress and the American people to support vast new spending.
In fact, Gerald W. McAtee, the head of ASSME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, he put it straight.
He said, Look, money's fungible.
We need this money so that we can keep other government workers from being laid off.
They're using the teachers as an excuse to keep other people who are state government bureaucrats and county bureaucrats and municipal bureaucrats on the payroll.
Think about this.
We're taxing men and women who were working on a manufacturing line somewhere or man in a cash register somewhere or tilling a field or doing something to earn a living in the private sector.
We are taxing them more and we're going to have them pay more in interest in the future in order to pass $10 billion to give to state and local governments, ostensibly for teachers, but really so they can keep from making tough decisions elsewhere.
Now, if that's not bad enough, think about this.
The bill started out at $10 billion, but they couldn't pass it through the Senate.
They didn't have the votes to get it past the filibuster.
So they had to get a couple other votes.
So what did they do?
Well, they found a couple of Republican senators who had a couple of concerns.
Senators Olympia Snow and Susan Collins.
They were concerned about their state budget.
And they wanted some money for their state budget.
$88 or excuse me, $77 billion in Medicaid spending.
And so what they said is, look, the $10 billion is inadequate.
We want some money to cover the $77 million to our state's general fund that's going to be incurred when the stimulus money for Medicaid funding goes away.
So we want you to extend the special supposedly one-time spending that you had for Medicaid assistance.
We want you to extend it for another period.
And that'll cost $77 million for our state, which doesn't sound like a lot in terms of the whole federal budget, but guess what?
If you do it for Maine, you've got to do it for everybody else.
So to get the two votes of the two senators from Maine and the request for $77 million for the Maine state budget, they had to add on a $16 billion price tag for Medicaid assistance to the rest of the states.
Because look, that's a tiny itsy-bitsy state compared to a lot of other states.
And if you give $77 million to Maine, you've got to give billions to states like New York and Texas and California and New Jersey and Florida.
So literally, $16 billion more.
And oh, incidentally, one of the senators, Susan Collins, had some concerns about the bathworks.
That's a big naval shipyard up there.
And she said, I'm worried about you cutting jobs at the Bath Ironworks by reducing some shipbuilding for the Navy.
Now, look, I want the military to have all the metal they want, but let's be candid about that.
Part of this is also she extracted promises with regard to ships.
So we're going to get a $26 billion bill.
The $10 billion for teachers they originally started out, the $16 billion for Medicaid that they had to put in in order to get the senators' votes from Maine, and it's now coming to the House of Representatives.
And how are they paying for it?
They're paying for it in part, $12 billion of it, by cutting food stamps.
The Senate voted to cut food stamp assistance starting in 2014.
Now, who thinks that that's going to actually happen?
The House is already saying we're balking at that.
We want to kick that out of the bill.
But who thinks in 2014 we're going to cut food stamps in order to pay then for something we've spent now?
And I want you to think about this.
This is all being done to supposedly stimulate the economy.
We need this $26 billion in order to stimulate the economy.
Of course, the $862 billion we authorized last year didn't stimulate the economy.
So why do we think that $26 billion more is going to do it?
Look, you know what the value of the U.S. economy is today?
It is $14,597,700,000,000.
So the $26 billion represents 0.18% of our GDP.
Every bit of it is going to be borrowed from the future.
Every bit of it is going to be red-inked.
And somehow or another, that $26 billion being added to the federal deficit is going to jumpstart a $14,567 billion economy.
Who's kidding themselves?
Who's kidding themselves?
All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're coming up to a break.
We'll be back to talk about politics here in our next segment.
Thanks for tuning in.
This is Karl Rove sitting in for himself, the man, Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, yeah, that's good.
That is really good.
We're back.
It's Karl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today.
You know, before we get to politics, you know, look, it's my first time here at Behind the Golden Mic, and I want to share with you what an extraordinary experience it is to be in Russia's inner sanctum, the lair, here in New York City.
It's a pretty amazing place.
I hope I don't break any of the security rules by describing what the lair looks like.
First of all, on the wall, there are some pictures of Rush.
These are some of the secret pictures of Rush that have not seen, you know, not seen the light of day, but he keeps them here inside the lair.
There's Rush, a picture over there in the corner of Rush pointing his gun at Saddam Hussein in the Heide Hole just before, you know, Sodom, he's pulling Sodom out of the Heidey Hole in Iraq, assisted by a couple of very tough Delta guys.
There's a picture of Gorbachev kneeling in front of Rush and kissing Russia's ring, declaring defeat in the war against communism.
I mean, that's a pretty extraordinary, a world-famous picture.
There's a picture of Rush with Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa planning private compassion all around the world.
I mean, these are some pretty amazing photographs.
There are some trophies.
Over there underneath in the corner is a plexiglass case that has Osama bin Laden's blankie that Rush retrieved from a cave in Afghanistan when Osama was fleeing the country when Rush on horseback, leading a group of Northern Alliance and Special Forces guys, almost caught Osama in the winter of 2001.
Anyway, this is an amazing place with lots of extraordinary things.
Some of you have said there's a bat suit in the corner, that thing that you saw in the movie, The Dark Knight.
I can tell you that's not true.
There is, however, a Captain America outfit in the corner with a special device where Rush just jumps in and the suit magically forms around him, and then he goes out and commits all of these wonderful acts of heroism on behalf of our country.
Anyway, it's amazing right here in the lair.
They promised that after we're finished, they're going to take me and show me the weapons locker.
Everybody here at the center is a highly trained fighter in the event that just to the south of us here is the NBC.
And if there's an attack from NBC launched across from Rockefeller Center, let me just tell you that every person here has been trained in weapons and armament.
And I mean, there is a, I met one of the web activists here, and she knows the computer from top to bottom.
But let me just tell you, the woman is walking around with a SIG revolver on her hip.
And I got to tell you, nothing's attractive as a computer nerd with a weapon.
Anyway, it's a pretty amazing place, and I'm delighted to be here.
We were talking about Governor Rick Perry greeting President Obama when President Obama arrives in Texas for a Democratic fundraising trip.
You might think that's sort of odd, a Republican governor greeting the Democratic president who's on a partisan foray into a state.
But I think President Obama's standing in the Lone Star State is so low, it does him well to draw attention to it.
You know, Obama can't go a lot of places this year.
I mean, his wife's more popular than he is, but she's not going to be able to deliver the kind of message he is.
A key test, a Democrat Well, she's in Spain getting ready for, you know, she's resting and relaxing and getting ready for the fall.
And after all, she's doing her part to help, you know, this economy in America is hurting.
And so she's doing her part in visiting some of the wonderful sites inside the United States of America that would benefit from the First Lady drawing attention to the wonderful scenery or facilities or hotels or other attractions available to him.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's right.
It's in the United States.
Spain is not in the United States.
Is that right?
So what are they actually doing in Spain, man?
For a moment there, I thought, what is she doing?
Well, look, if she was costing a lot, I don't begrudge him a vacation, but why is she vacation inside the United States of America, the Estados Unitas rather than Española?
I don't know.
It's anyway.
Yeah.
Hey, did you see the things?
Hey, Snurly, did you see the thing this morning in the newspaper where they said sort of White House, you know, political consultants close to the White House said to Democrats, avoid bragging about our accomplishments?
Avoid bragging?
I mean, how?
I mean, yeah, I want him to go out and brag.
Come on.
Look, I mean, do they think politics is like, oh, don't say that you did something nice, that you did something good, because people will be upset with you.
No, no, no, no.
They're saying avoid bragging is a convenient way.
Don't tell them what you did.
For God's sake, don't admit it.
And anyway, it's going to be an interesting fall.
How did the president end up here?
How did he end up here?
In the next segment, I want to spend some time going over how the president ended up here and share with you a poll, the outlines of a poll, a devastating poll that is going to come out tomorrow.
And it is going to be a mind-blower.
I don't want to get into the specific numbers, but I want to talk to you about a secret poll that will be coming out tomorrow from American Crossroads of key Senate battlegrounds that measures the effectiveness of Democratic and Republican messages.
And we'll do that in the next half an hour.
But I don't want to start it right now because we'll run out of time here at the bottom.
But it's pretty remarkable what's happening in American politics.
President of the United States going to Texas today.
He's alone on the range, as they say in Texas, because he's not being greeted by the Democratic candidate for governor who finds the president so toxic that he's trying to find a way to be on the other side of the state.
And remarkable testimony.
Yeah, let's take a quick call here before we break here at the bottom of the hour.
Scott in Troy, Michigan.
Hi, Mr. Rose.
Nice to speak with you.
Thank you, Scott.
I just wanted to let the listeners out there be aware.
I'm an insurance agent in Michigan here, health insurance.
And all the companies that I represent have now been mandated by the Obamacare bill that they have to pay out 20% in benefits of all the premiums they receive.
Well, the first year I make 20% in.
They have to put out 85%, isn't it, on actual benefits?
They have to limit their administrative cost to 15% overall.
Well, what's going to end up happening is I won't make 20% anymore.
I'll make 5%.
Right.
So I'll be out of work.
All the other agents in the state of Michigan will be out of work.
And that means that all the people looking for insurance won't have an agent that can show them the proper benefits that they require, won't be able to fight for them if the insurance company denies some sort of a claim.
So basically, it's just one more step down the road to national health.
Yeah, and look, it was a deliberate effort.
This so-called, you know, this limit on non-medical expenditures is designed to help shift the burden of the cost of health care back onto insurance companies and insurance agents.
Now, insurance companies, on an average, last year had a profit margin of just over 3 cents on every dollar.
So if you start saying you've got to limit the total amount of money that you can spend on anything other than somebody's medical expenses to some arbitrary number, it's going to squeeze everything and you don't have much to squeeze.
And so what they end up squeezing is they end up squeezing people like you straight out of the market of providing service and it causes them to diminish the services they provide to their clients as well.
So at the end of the day, we all end up in a place where we get lousier service and the federal government gets to tell us more of what we want to do and we become increasingly less happy with what we get.
And at the end of the day, we become more receptive to the government taking it over because after all, it won't cost us anything and we'll get that fine service that we get when we go to the post office.
This is just the front edge of this.
And we're going to see more of this in the months ahead.
Small businesses all around the country are starting to meet with their insurance agent or their benefits counselor and they're figuring out how bad this bill is going to be for them.
I was just, you know, we're coming up to a break here.
We've got to go shortly, but I want to come back when we come back.
I want to talk some more about how this is happening.
Because as I went around the country, I just finished a book tour for my book, Courage and Consequence.
And everywhere I went, small business people talked to me about health care and what's happening to their employees.
And the picture of what's coming is ugly for America and ugly for American workers.
So thanks for your call, and we'll talk more about this when we come back after the break.
Well, welcome back.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
You know, every man has his critics, and I have mine.
And I've already heard from one of them.
When I referred to Saddam Hussein's hidey hole, I got an email from my friend Pinky Joe Albaugh.
This is the guy who was the campaign manager for President Bush in his 2000 campaign.
He's about 6'4 ⁇ .
He has a flat top.
And I love calling him Pinky, particularly when he is about 800 or 900 miles away from me.
But he said, look, it's not a hidey hole.
It's a freighty hole.
And that's what they say.
He's from Oklahoma.
And that's the place where in Oklahoma, a freighty hole is what you call the place that you go to get away from a tornado.
But, Joseph, you're wrong.
Pinky, you're wrong.
A hidey hole is what they found Saddam Hussein in.
He was in Iraq, not in Oklahoma.
If he was in Oklahoma, we'd call it a freighty hole.
And in Iraq, we call it a hidey hole.
Anyway, enough of that from my friend Joseph Alba.
Look, we were talking about health care before the break, and I want to come back to that subject because the insurance agent made it clear that already the mandates in this bill are going to have a physical cost.
And the physical cost is that he is going to no longer find it economical to provide services.
The assumption was if we cut you from 20% to 5%, that all we're doing is we're cutting out some of your unnecessary profit.
In reality, he can't provide that service anymore.
And that's going to be happening throughout this bill.
There are going to be so many mandates and so many rules and so many regulations that the cost of health care is going to be dramatically above what it would otherwise be.
And that's not the worst of it.
The worst of it is that we're going to find that people are going to lose the coverage that they now have.
You know, I was out in Kansas City, Missouri.
I was actually in Johnson County, Kansas, and I met a guy who runs a construction company.
And he said to me, he said, look, I made $50 million where our sales last year.
And he said, we didn't make any money.
And I paid out $598,000 for the health care coverage for my employees.
He said, now, the year before, we had a $50 million in sales, but we made a bunch of money that year in 2008.
But he said in 2009, everybody was sharpening their pencils, so they were just trying to meet their payroll and pay their overhead.
So he said, we had to compete that way, and we didn't make any money.
But I paid the $598,000 for my employees' health care.
Pretty good program benefits that he gives his people.
If you're with him for six years, you get $8,400 for a family of four.
But he said, look, I've been meeting with my benefits guy, and the benefits guy is telling me that under the bill, my costs are going to go to as high as $800,000.
And he said, I'm not going to be able to provide that.
He said, I'm not making any money.
And if my costs go there, I'm not going to be able to provide it.
However, if I dump the coverage for my employees, I don't get fined on the first 40 employees, and I get fined $2,000 on each of the 30 employees above and beyond.
He had 70 employees in his company.
And he said, you know, guess what?
My choice is between $598,000 today or $800,000 in a year or two versus $60,000.
And I think I don't want to do it.
But he said, if I want to keep my business going, I may have to dump the coverage and dump every one of these people into the government exchange.
Now, you know, that's happening everywhere across America.
And small business people all across the country are starting to meet with their insurance agent or their benefit counselor or talking with their own human resources person.
And they're beginning to find out what it means to their employees.
And guess what?
They're not going to wait until it actually happens in order to start telling people, warning people, preparing people for that moment, which is one of the reasons why health care is going to get less popular as time goes on rather than more popular, particularly between now and November.
Because these employers are going to be smart.
They're not going to want to treat their employees as, you know, sort of mushrooms to be kept in the dark.
They're going to want to tell them what's going on and what's coming.
And it's going to be very problematic for them.
And it's not going to just be small enterprises like this 70-person construction company.
I was having dinner with a CEO of a company that employs 100,000 people.
A lot of them are part-time.
A lot of them are young, so they elect not to participate in the program.
We were talking about health care.
I said, well, what is this bill going to do to you?
He said, look, right now we're putting out $25 million a year in health care coverage costs for our employees.
He said, this bill will drive it to $90 million a year.
We'll pay $65 million more a year for health care.
And I said, well, what are you going to do?
He said, I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We're going to dump the coverage for every single employee, starting with me, the CEO.
Every single employee is going to lose their coverage.
And every employee that we now is a part-time employee, part-time under the health care law is defined as 30 hours.
He said, every employee now who works 31 or 32 or 33 or 34 hours, we're putting in place a system so that they will no longer be able to work anything more than 30 hours.
And he said, look, I know what my workforce is like.
He said, I know who my employees are.
He said, I've got single moms who are working who need 34 hours or 35 hours in order to meet their bills.
I got students who don't want to work.
Sometimes they want to work 34, 35, 36 hours during the summer because they've got time to sort of earn the money for school.
And he said, but that's not going to happen.
And what's going to, you know, I cannot afford the $2,000 fine if they work 31 hours.
So we're going to have them only work 30 hours.
And what's going to happen is they'll work 30 hours at my place, and then they'll go down the street and work someplace else to pick up the four or five or six hours.
He says it's going to be not going to be good for them.
It's not going to be as easy as it is now, but that's the way it's going to be because this law is going to drive my costs to a point where I cannot afford it.
Think about that, going from $25 million a year to $90 million a year.
I mean, that $65 million is going to come from somewhere, and it ain't going to come from profits like that.
I mean, this is the kind of thing we're going to see repeated time and time again all across the country because of this new health care reform.
In fact, Price Watershouse Cooper, I believe it is, let me grab my piece of paper right here, did a study of this in which they found that the cost of this bill was going to drive health care costs up.
Let's see here.
Where is it right here?
Got to find it.
Going to find it right here.
It is going to drive the cost of this up more than it would be otherwise by, I want to say 111%.
Let me just check that number.
Yeah, there we go.
Price Watershouse Cooper estimated passing Obamacare would drive up the average cost of insurance premiums by 111% in the first decade compared to 79% if nothing were done.
And look, we don't need to do nothing.
There are plenty of things that we could do that would hold down insurance, rising insurance premiums.
But think about that.
If we do nothing, it's going to go up nearly 80%.
If we do what we did, which is pass Obamacare, it's going to go up over 111%.
And, you know, that's because of these additional mandates and costs that we built into the law.
But so rather than saying what can we do to get more competition by allowing there to be a nationwide market in health insurance so you can buy health insurance across state lines, we didn't do that.
Rather than saying, look, we want small business people to be able to join together to pool their risk at the same discounts the big boys get, we didn't do that.
Rather than saying, look, we're going to do something about getting rid of these junk and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up the cost of health care for every single American, we didn't do that.
Instead, what we did is we passed something that's going to drive up costs through mandates, regulations, rules, and dictates from Washington.
They're going to drive them up more than they would go up otherwise.
And didn't President Obama promise us, hey, if we pass the bill, and one of the reasons we need to pass it is because we want to lower premiums?
I guess it was just another thing where he was misleading us.
Anyway, we've gotten off on a little health care kick here.
Let's take a quick call before the break from Lee and Wheeling, Illinois, and then we'll come back and talk politics here after the break.
Lee, you there?
Yes, I am.
It's an honor to speak with you, Mr. Roh.
I bought your book, and it is fantastic.
Well, thanks for reading it.
I'm really delighted you enjoyed it.
I had a lot of fun writing.
I'm my library.
Oh, well, thank you.
Oh, fabulous.
Well, send me an envelope to my P.O. box in Washington, 25564-ZIPS20027.
I'll send you a book plate to slap in the front of the book.
Repeat this, please.
P.O. Box 25564-25564 at the ZIP It's 20027.
2007.
You can also, if you didn't write that down, go to rove.com.
It's got my mailing address.
Offers good for anybody who's listening today.
If you bought Courage and Consequence and want an autographed book plate, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope to my P.O. box and I'll send you one for listening to me, for suffering through me on Rush Limbaugh today.
Anyway, Lee, enough about my book, Courage and Consequence, available at your local bookstore.
Let's go.
What's your question?
Okay.
Why do the Republicans stress the fact that the Democrats ruled the Congress the last two years of Bush's administration?
It's a good point and well worth reminding the American people that the Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2007, the last four years.
And, you know, the president had a veto and he was able to force them as a result to control spending, but it is a sign that they got things done and did things in a way, started tilting things their direction.
And once President Obama got in, they simply made it worse.
But it's a good point well worth stressing.
They've shown to us how much, you know, they have criticized Bush's spending not because it was too much, but because they thought it was too little.
They criticized Bush on deficits, not because they thought they were too much, but because they thought they were too little.
They criticized Bush for reining in federal power, not because they thought he was doing too little of that, but because they thought he was doing too much of it.
And so it's a good thing to remind people.
Anyway, let's come back.
We'll talk politics after the break.
This is Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, who's presiding over the conclave of our vast right-wing conspiracy in an undisclosed location.
Cheney hosted lunch.
My understanding is that after lunch, there's going to be a presentation by Speaker Gingrich on the seven great steps to save American civilization, which it's part of the ongoing conspiracy here of the right-wingers to take back our country from the community organizer, the lady from San Francisco, and that really weird guy from Las Vegas.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
I hope to hear you on the other side of the break.
Ah, we're coming on with a saucy Latin beat, sort of a Carlos Santana thing going there.
Very cool.
Incidentally, let's have this disclaimer put on right at the start.
I picked none of the music.
And the reason I picked none of the music is I'm incapable of picking the music.
Fortunately, we have a gigantic Rush Limbaugh Musicology Department here at the EAIB Central, and they do a fantastic job.
Let's go to the phones.
We've got a fantastic caller waiting for us, Scott from the very coolly named Lone Wolf, Oklahoma.
Scott, are you there?
Yeah, I'm still here.
Yeah, Carl.
Am I still on?
You're on, man.
You are on.
The nation is listening for the words of Scott from Lone Wolf, Oklahoma.
Hey, yeah.
Noah, I just wanted to ask you, what are the Republicans going to do if they get control of the House and Senate, which we're hoping?
And then, of course, Obama will have the veto pin and he'll veto everything they put through, and he'll call them the do-nothing Congress.
What should be their strategy if that takes place?
Well, their strategy ought to be to do the right thing and to force him to veto the right thing and then to stand up and defend the right thing.
Well, first of all, look, let's be clear about it.
This is all in the hands of the people that get elected this fall, whether they live up to what our expectations and hopes are, if they live up to what they're saying, many of them on the campaign trail, or if they wimp out.
And if they wimp out, the moment will pass and the American people will walk away from them.
So if the Republicans win this fall, after talking about the need to control spending, to reduce the deficit, to strengthen our economy, to cut taxes, to keep our military strong, to stand for our traditional values, then by God, when they get into office, they better do it.
And if they do it, the American people will reward tough decisions, even if the president vetoes it.
And the president can't veto everything.
I mean, you can control spending by basically starving things in the budget.
And he can be threatened, and he can do this, and he can do that.
But eventually, you'll win a lot of what you are fighting for.
If on Obamacare, we stand up and begin to whittle away at it.
There are going to be some things where he's going to find it uncomfortable to veto him.
And even if he does veto him, let's make an issue about it.
Let's have confidence that we're on the winning side, and that if we explain to the American people what we're doing and why we're doing it and how we're doing it, that they'll hold he and his people accountable in the 2012 election.
I mean, look, battles are not won overnight.
Our system of government was not designed by the founders to be won overnight.
These things will take time.
But if we stay in the fight and we have the courage of our convictions and we realize what's at stake and love our country enough to stay in the fight, then we will, at the end of the day, win.
And that's what's the most important thing for us.
I mean, this is not an election like a normal election.
I've been around a long time in politics, even though I started at a relatively young age, so I've seen a lot of contests.
These next two contests really are among the most important in the nation's history because if we fail to put the country in the right direction, then the country will look dramatically different than the way it was when we grew up and when we came to adulthood in the kind of country that has been so magnificent for so many generations of Americans.
What's my prediction?
Yeah, look, well, let's get into that in the next hour.
We're going to devote, we're going to stay away from policy as much as I'm a nerd and love to talk about things.
Like I even brought a copy of the Medicare actuaries report, Medicare trustee's report, and the actuary's disavowal of that report.
But we're going to spend the next hour talking about, hey, man, I love that kind of stuff.
Look, and think about this.
This is just, I had to read to page 281 of the actuary's report, Snerdley, before I read the actuary said there is a strong likelihood that certain of these changes will not be viable in the long range.
Specifically, the annual price updates for most categories of non-physician health services will be adjusted downward each year by the growth in economy-wide productivity.
You know what that means?
It means the Medicare program is going to heck in a handbasket and the health care bill is making it even worse.
And the assumptions upon which the trustees made their glowing upbeat projections are completely phony.
It means we're in a deep doo-doo, as 41 would say.
Anyway, let's hear we're coming up to a break here.
Let's take a brief break here.
Then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about policy before we come back and talk about politics.
I've been promising it for about an hour and a half, nearly two hours, but we're actually going to do it.
Nothing but politics the next hour, and we'll be taking some of your calls.
Thanks.
We'll be back after the break.
Well, welcome back.
Welcome back.
We're nearing the end of the second hour of Karl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
And yes, got a couple of emails during the break.
Yes, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to P.O. Box25564, Washington, D.C., 20027.
If you've bought my book, Courage and Consequence, and I'll send you an autographed book plate, inscribe book plate to slap in the front of it.
And I want to thank those of you who emailed me to say that you, like our recent caller, enjoyed it.
I had a lot of fun writing it, and it was quite an experience.
Yeah, I'd like to do another one if I could come up with something to write about, like maybe my adventures with Snerdley and Kit Carson.
I mean, you know, I mean, and yeah, no, no, that would be a long, engrossing volume of stories of heroic achievement in the fight to preserve American culture and civilization, is what it would be.
Snerdley, you're looking good, man, incidentally.
You know, you're casual.
That's one of the great things about the EIB network is that everybody looks like, you know, they're very casual.
They're with it.
They're hip.
They're cool and they like each other.
Everybody around here has been very nice.
Well, thanks for having me here in the secret lair.
You know, look, we're going to be talking politics next hour.
I know that many of you have a political addiction.
I'm here to provide you some help, at least through the November election.
If you will go to rove.com and sign up, I will send you every Thursday a link to my column in the Wall Street Journal.
And more importantly, I will send you a one-page sheet on some interesting things about polling that I've seen called Polling News and Notes.
And I will send you my Senate map showing the current status of all the Senate races and my predictions for the Senate.
Absolutely free.
Rove.com.
It's my little gift to you to help preserve your sanity between now and the November election.
We're coming to the end of the hour.
Come back and spend some time with us in the next hour.
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