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Aug. 16, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:32
August 16, 2010, Monday, Hour #2
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Greetings, my good friends, and welcome back.
I am Rush Limbaugh, mind over chatter, charting the course, leading the way.
Great to have you along as we meet and surpass all audience expectations on a daily basis.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address lrushbaugh at eibnet.com.
I think what we need, I'm one more comment on this mosque business, and we're going to move on here to the dire economic circumstances that we are not going to let Obama get a pass on just because he stuck his foot in it on the mosque in New York.
I think what we might need, ladies and gentlemen, is some translators.
Clearly, the American left and even ruling class Republicans just are not able to see things for what they are.
The mosque, this mosque has nothing to do with religion.
It has nothing to do with religious freedom, the American way.
This mosque and supporting its construction near the site of Ground Zero has nothing to do with reaching out so that another generation of Muslims doesn't hate us.
This is all predicated, if you believe that, that we deserved what happened on 9-11.
As, by the way, the esteemed Reverend Wright does.
America's chickens have come home to roost, he proudly and happily said, right after he talked about, Bill was right and dirty, Monica Lewinsky, who we've learned today, by the way, also had a crush on Stephanopoulos.
There's a new book out.
She wouldn't leave Stephanopoulos alone.
Monica had a crush on Stephanopoulos.
At any rate, this idea that we're responsible for this, that somehow there's a legitimate reason for this expression of militant Islamic hatred, that's what undergirds this.
We somehow, remember shortly after 9-11, it wasn't long before the Bush Pentagon, I'm sorry, the Bush State Department convened a panel.
Why do they hate us so much?
Have we done anything to warrant the attacks on 9-11?
Obviously, there are many Americans who think so, including apparently the president.
And it seems practically all Democrats.
And so in their view, building the mosque is a way to reach out to show another generation of Muslims that we don't hate them.
But this isn't about religion or religious freedom or the American way.
This has everything to do with, what's the word, optics?
Optics is the popular word these days.
Everything to do with optics.
Signals.
Twin Towers are now a hole in the ground.
Right?
Two blocks away, a 13-story mosque.
There's your optic.
The World Trade Center, a hole in the ground two blocks away, a 13-story mosque.
And the infidel is too gullible to interpret it for what it is.
The American left, the Democrats, Obama undown, too gullible to interpret that optic for what it is.
Greg Gutfield, who hosts Red Eye, the Fox News channel, okay, we'll put a gay bar next to your mosque to reach out to gay Muslim men in the interests of reaching out and sensitivity and fairness and non-discrimination.
And it will show that we're better.
We're better people.
We'll put a gay bar there for you guys.
Of course, no takers on that.
Mort Vuckerman is back with another piece of writing, this time in the Wall Street Journal about the regime.
His piece today is entitled The End of American Optimism, which he defines in the first paragraph.
This is fascinating to see what Mort Vuckerman considers to be optimistic.
Listen to this opener.
Our brief national encounter with optimism is now well and truly over.
We have had the greatest fiscal and monetary stimulus in modern times.
We have had a whole series of programs to pay people to buy cars, to purchase homes, to pay off their mortgages, to weatherize their homes, and install solar paneling on their roofs.
Yet the recovery remains feeble, and the aftershocks of the post-bubble credit collapse are ongoing.
Is this what he, is this the end of the optimum?
We tried all this optimistic stuff and it didn't work.
Whether that's what he means or not, this is an incredible paragraph.
Our brief national encounter with optimism is now well and truly over.
We've had the greatest fiscal and monetary stimulus in modern times.
We've had a whole series of programs to pay people to buy cars, to purchase homes, to pay off their mortgages, to weatherize their homes, to install solar paneling on their roofs, all to stimulate an economy.
None of it worked.
It remains feeble.
The aftershocks of the post-bubble credit collapse are ongoing.
We're at least 2.5 million jobs short of getting back to the unemployment rate of under 8% promised by the regime.
Concern grows that we're looking at a double-dip recession and hovering on the brink of a destructive deflation.
Things are bad enough for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernaki to have characterized all of this late last month as unusually uncertain.
Are we at the end of the post-World War II period of growth?
Tons of money have been shoveled in to rescue reckless banks and to fill a huge hole in the economy, but nothing's working the way it normally had in all our previous crises.
Really, has this kind of stimulus worked in the past to revive an economy?
I'm not aware of that.
I know the Keynesians believe it has, but World War II was not Keynesian stimulus.
Anyway, rather, we are in what a number of economists are referring to as the new normal.
This is a much slower growing economy that recent surveys have revealed is causing many Americans to distance themselves from the long-held assumption that their children will have it better than they.
Well, once again, ladies and gentlemen, it's up to me to properly define a term, the new normal.
According to Mort Vuckerman and all of these economists he's referring to, the new normal means, you know what?
Salad days are over.
The idea that your kids are going to do better than you, look at it.
We've had our run.
We really gave it our best shot, but that can't go on.
We just can't sustain it.
Can't lead the world economically.
Can't go on.
The new normal is, yeah, you better expect things to get worse.
Don't expect to get a job in the next two to three years.
It's going to take at least that long to get down to 8% employment, unemployment.
Really, there's not a whole lot to look forward to.
That's the new normal.
That's what they say it is.
Can I tell you what the new normal is?
What do you think?
Dawn, you're nodding at me.
What do you think the new normal is?
No idea?
Well, you were nodding at me as you were all knowing.
Thirdly, I love doing this, folks.
Ask people, what do you think the new normal really is?
What is it?
I'll tell you what the new normal is.
No, the new normal is simply a construction designed to save Obama and the Democrats from any association with this economic collapse.
Calling this a new normal is simply to say, hey, you know, this is not the result of any Democrat policy.
This is not the result of Obamaomics.
This is not, no, this is just America.
And by golly, by gosh, Obama's doing the best he can with it, but he's only got so much to work with.
The new normal, I mean, it's what it is.
This is not the result of bad economic policy.
This is not the fault of Obama.
New normal is defining the Obama Depression down.
This is ridiculous.
And you, as a citizen, ought not settle for the idea that this is America going forward, that this is the new normal, because I'm telling you right now, it's not.
All this quote-unquote new normal is, is an excuse.
It's giving Obama and the regime a pass.
We've gone from optimism to opticism and opticism, the optics, how it looks.
It's just the new normal.
I'll tell you where the fools, anybody who was optimistic at Obama's stimulus program, those are the people who need to be cast away.
Those are the people who need to be ignored.
These Keynesians, oh, yeah, this is the way they said.
This is what we have to do.
This will create jobs shovel-ready, all that rotgut.
We now know 20 months, it's all a bust.
All the bailouts, all the stimuli have failed.
And so now what do we have with the new normal?
Yeah.
This is it, folks.
Get used to it.
This is the new America in decline.
And it's just coincidental that it happened when the Obama regime took office.
To give you an idea of how poorly Keynesian economics worked, the stock market never reached its 1929 peak until 1954.
Now, let me put this in perspective for you.
We tried Keynesian stimulus policy, FDR, the New Deal.
That's going to bring us down to the 1929 Depression.
Guess what?
We didn't reach stock market peaks that existed in 29 until 1954.
1954.
So it only took 25 years to get back to where we were in 1929 with Keynesian stimuli.
So the new normal means if you're not happy, tough toenails.
If you're not happy, lower your expectations, because this is it, baby.
New normal is designed to get you to give up.
New normal is a creation to get you to go ahead and accept mediocrity in your country.
Brief time out, back with much more to this.
Don't go away.
The new normal.
Let me define it for you further.
The new normal is a $7 million yacht with no state taxes for John F. Kerry, the haughty senator who once served in Vietnam.
The new normal is a new beachfront mansion and a host of private planes for Al Gore.
The new normal is a super wedding for Chelsea Clinton.
The new normal is 30 luxury rooms and a five-star European resort for Moochel Obama.
But the new normal for us is to tighten our belts and to accept excrement sandwiches, some days with mustard and some days not.
The new normal is no expectation.
The new normal is get real, get with it.
This is your lot in life.
So when Morton Vuckerman and the rest of these people write about the new normal, he's so-called economists, and he quotes, ask yourself, where do we go to get the old normal back?
I'll tell you the first place we go to get the old normal back is the ballot box that's going to be in November.
Have you noticed the Democrat Party does not stand up for this country?
They just don't.
And in fact, not only do they not stand up for the country any chance they get to join in criticism of this country, they get in line.
They race to be the first to speak.
Let me just put it out there.
In the middle of wars, the Democrat Party undermines our armed forces, Iraq, anybody.
Harry Reid famously said, we had lost.
This war is lost when our brave soldiers were fighting on the battlefields of Iraq.
The Democrat Party does not believe we should secure our border.
The Democrat Party does not believe we should enforce federal immigration law.
When it comes to zoning at ground zero, they stand with an imam who refuses to denounce Hamas.
And then they have the gall to tell us, this is what America is all about.
Well, America is not about losing wars.
America is not about a nation in decline with no great expectations for the future.
America is not about giving up.
America is not about opening the borders to virtually anybody who wants to get into the country and corrupt it for the sake of empowering one corrupt political party.
That's not what America is all about.
Notice all of the perversion, all of the corruption, all of the outrageousness that the Democrats stand up and say this is what America is about.
And it's not.
The Democrat Party is not about what America is about.
And that's the big problem that we face.
Democrat Party, arguably you could say that they were, remember it was just last week.
It was just last week.
Our good friends at the Politico with a big story on how off-beat Republican candidates are.
How kooky, weird, and oddball Republican candidates are.
In the meantime, the new normal is a bunch of anti-America or America's wrong.
Blame America first.
Democrats is what America is like all about.
From thehill.com, White House tries to move on from debate over controversial New York mosque.
Well, that they are.
Now that the president's had his say, the White House communications shop looking to move on, according to spokesman Bill Burton.
Yeah, well, nothing here.
Nothing to report, nothing here.
Let's just move on.
I have some analogies for you to building a mosque.
13-story mosque at Ground Center.
To show their understanding, the victims of the Bernie Madoff scream, a scam, have all contributed to a fund to support his now penniless wife and further support his children for the rest of their lives.
As an illustration, in the pop world, remember the song stylist Rihanna, beaten to a pulp by Chris Brown.
Well, in our current Democrat world, Rihanna has just purchased a club membership, weightlifting, and karate class for Chris Brown to show that she harbors no ill will for being beaten to a pulp.
The family of O.J. Simpson, wife, the family of O.J. Simpson's dead wife, and now building and funding a museum to honor O.J.'s athletic accomplishments.
Isn't it a beautiful thing?
Why, that's what America's really all about.
Denise Brown leads the way to raise money to build a giant museum and to try get OJ released from jail so he can celebrate the groundbreaking for the construction of the OJ Athletic Museum.
That's the American way.
And the Michigan militia granted permission by the Obama administration to build a Timothy McVeigh monument across the street from the site of the Mura Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
We could all get behind that, couldn't we?
A Timothy McVeigh memorial to show we're better than Timothy McVeigh.
I kind of dig it.
Dispatch from Planet Stimulus.
Stephen Spruill, National Review Online, The Corner.
Energy funds went unspent.
U.S. auditor says the recession is lingering.
So is the unspent stimulus money that was meant to help it.
The latest example, $3.2 billion.
Congress voted February 2009 part of an economic stimulus package to provide jobs and improve energy efficiency through block grants to states and cities.
Only about 8.4% of the money had been spent by the beginning of this month.
The weatherization scam.
This is, and Mort Vuckerman referred to it in his opening paragraph in his Wall Street Journal piece.
The weatherization program.
This is economic expansion, economic growth.
This is stimulus.
It's going to create jobs.
The weatherization program got to be one of the biggest scams to ever come down the pike.
And with this regime, that's saying a lot.
But one reason, if you read Steven Spruill's piece, one reason they can't spend the money fast enough is the unions, which behind or underneath every pile of crap in this country, you will find a union leader somewhere.
Back at.
Quick question.
Is Obama losing America the way Walter Klondike lost LBJ or LBJ lost Walter Klondike?
I don't know, but the daily Gallup tracking poll not good.
Obama approval sinks to a 42% lull.
It's an all-time low.
Didn't get a whole lot of play out there, but earlier in the week, Gallup surveyed Americans and how the president was handling a slew of issues.
The only issue where Obama has majority support from the Americans is his handling of race relations.
That's the only issue where he is above 50%.
To the phones, Dover, New Hampshire.
And Bob, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Hi, Russ.
Hi.
Russ.
Yes.
Saturday was the 65th anniversary of VJ Day, and our president never mentioned it.
All he did was talk about the mosque.
Yeah.
Well, just a second out here, Bob.
For those of you in Rio Linda and in Port St. Lucie, VJ Day, victory.
You think Riolindians know that?
Victory in Japan, victory over Japan in World War II.
You have to give Obama, cut him some slack, Bob.
He's stated a couple of times, particularly in reference to Afghanistan, he's not comfortable with the whole concept of victory.
So, you know, VJ, it's got victory in there.
I wouldn't expect him to herald that anniversary.
Yeah, well, I'm a Navy veteran of World War II, a Purple Heart, Kabikazi survivor.
And, you know, I thought he would at least mention the day, but I guess the mosque was more important.
Most definitely it is.
In fact, Bob, and by the way, God bless you.
Thank you.
But let me tell you something.
When Obama made his statement that he's uncomfortable with the concept of victory in Afghanistan, he cited, following example, he said, I don't want one of those scenes like we had on the USS Missouri where the Japanese ambassador comes to come on and get down on his knees and blah blah.
They thought it was humiliating.
He was uncomfortable with that.
So, I mean, I, you know, not to pile on here, but there's no reason that VJ Day would even register with Obama.
He may not have even known it, Bob.
Yeah, I believe that.
Well, Bob is part of new normal we want to go back to.
Bob, thanks for the call very much.
Okay.
You bet.
You bet.
Somewhere in Alabama, must remain anonymous.
Cannot give the name.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks.
It's an honor to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
I am calling because I am one of the weatherization contractors you're speaking about.
I have first-hand experience about the program itself, and I can tell you it's a pretty big joke.
It is obviously nothing but another entitlement program.
We're going into people's homes that they call unfortunate or underprivileged, and we're doing the things that the rest of us have to do at our homes out of our own pockets, whether it be insulating their homes or simply changing a hot water heater.
The biggest joke is actually from the administration standpoint, from the administration standpoint, there's so much disorganization.
I've actually taken classes telling me how they want these things done, the exact things that they want done at a federal level.
And then we turn around and go to the local agencies, and there are about 17 throughout the state, but each one of them has a different way that they want these things done.
So it's not even efficient from the standpoint of just the work itself.
We have to turn around and do things to appease certain administrators.
Let me ask you a question out there.
Can't give your name.
What are you weatherizing against in Alabama?
Well, basically, we go to people's homes.
They tell us they have $400 or $500 a month electric bills or gas bills.
And what we're doing is supposed to be bringing down those bills.
So, you know, we may spend anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000 per home.
And once we do the work that we do, all it's supposed to do is bring down their electric bill.
We're supposed to seal the air from flowing through the home.
Right.
And taxpayers are paying for the weatherization.
Absolutely.
100%.
There's nothing that comes out of the homeowner's pocket.
$5,000 to $7,000 to weatherize a home in order to get a bill down $100 a month.
That's average.
Some of them are more.
We've seen them $12,000 to $15,000 a home.
Right.
So it's going to take decades to pay all this back in terms of savings.
Absolutely.
But then, of course, when the carbon tax hits, everybody's utility bill is going to go up, canceling out the savings.
That's right.
Absolutely.
So this is a bunch of make-work designed to make Obama and the left look good like they care and like they're doing things to help people with global warming and so forth.
And there are no standards to it.
You've got to make differently for every bureaucracy you're working with.
That's right.
Absolutely.
And there's just complete disorganization of the whole thing.
How'd you get into this?
Well, the guy that I work for, we've done work for the government my entire tenure with this company.
We work at the VA hospitals and things like that, but this is just a program that, you know, money was taken away from certain VAs, or we're able either that or we're just not able to get it.
But I know exactly what happened.
Money is being taken away from the food stamp program for Michelle Obama's obesity program.
That's right.
That's right.
Oh, that's how it works.
Okay.
So you took money away from the VA to weatherize places.
Absolutely.
Well, and I say they've taken it away.
I don't have any documentation showing that, but I can tell you that I stayed at the VA hospitals for about four or five years, and now we have absolutely nothing there.
So I would imagine it's happened that way.
Delightful.
Just delightable.
Thanks for the call.
Can't give your name.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Well, it is a pleasure to talk to you.
Why am I not surprised?
And this is the tip of the iceberg when these people get their hands finally on your health care.
In fact, nothing's real.
Nothing is real.
All of this.
Well, but the frustrating thing about it, the moment I hear Obama say we got a weatherization program, solar panels on the roof, it's all bogus, especially as economic stimulus.
It's insanity.
These people think any of this matters.
It doesn't matter to a hill of beans.
Here we go from thehill.com.
Democrats who reluctantly slashed a food stamp program to fund a state aid bill may have to do it again to pay for a top priority of the First Lady Muchel Obama.
The House will soon consider an $8 billion child nutrition bill.
That's at the center of the First Lady's Let's Move initiative.
Before leaving for the summer recess, the Senate passed a smaller version of the legislation that's paid for by trimming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, commonly known as food stamps.
The proposed cuts would come on top of a 13.6% SNAP reduction in the $26 billion Medicaid and Education State funding bill that the regime's leaders signed this week.
Well, last week.
Party leaders raided the budget to find offsetting tax increases and spending cuts to pay for their top legislative priorities, including the roughly $900 billion health care law.
So basically, what we have here, I mean, if I put this in perspective, by cutting the food stamp program, what we're going to do is take food away from fat people so that Muchel Obama can run around and tell you what to eat and call it her obesity initiative.
Here's a quote from the story.
It's very, very sad.
I think it's just illustrating what dire straits our federal government budget is in, said Sheila Zedeluski, director of the Urban Institute's Income and Benefits Center.
It's unprecedented to raid one safety net program to feed another.
Unprecedented.
So we're taking food away from fat people so that Muchell Obama can move forward on her obesity initiative.
Today's winner in the EIB iPad giveaway, Janice W. of Billings, Montana, big sky country, facebook.com slash rushlimbaugh.
We inaugurated our Facebook page last week, and we're up now, what is it, 381,000 friends, over 10 million hits on the page.
381,000 friends.
That means 381,000 people have registered.
We have nine iPads to give away.
Two have gone, so seven more to go.
The next one will have another drawing late tonight after midnight.
We'll announce that winner tomorrow.
If you're already signed up, you're signed up.
You're eligible for every drawing that takes place from now through August 30th because we're giving an iPad away every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on the Facebook page.
If you're not registered, go there, facebook.com slash Rush Limbaugh, where you can also sign up for Rush in a Hurry, which is a wonderful little compendium summary of each day's broadcast.
About a half hour to an hour afterwards serves the interlude between the end of the program and the full update of our website, usually between 5.30 and 6 p.m. Eastern Time each and every day.
New ID theft targets kids.
Social security numbers could threaten the credit system.
This is the latest form of identity theft.
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They're now targeting your kids' numbers long before they even have a bank account.
Therefore, long before you'll even know the social security number has been swiped, hundreds of online businesses are using computers to find dormant social security numbers, usually those assigned to kids who don't use them, and then selling those numbers under another name to help people establish phony credit and run up huge debts that they will never pay off.
So if you have a life lock for yourself, you might want to, if you've gotten social security numbers for your kid or kids, you might want to add them.
You should add them.
No doubt about it.
It's just the latest scam and the scams are growing.
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I'm sorry, 440-4833-800-440-4833.
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The battle raging over the mosque at Ground Zero is bringing new attention to another less publicized controversy involving another house of worship in Lower Manhattan from Human Events about a week ago.
St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which once sat right across from the street from the World Trade Center, was crushed when the towers collapsed on 9-11.
St. Nicholas was the only church to be lost in the attacks.
Nine years later, City of New York officials are busy removing every impediment to the building of a mosque two blocks away.
The future of the Greek Orthodox Church remains unclear.
The last bit of hopeful news for St. Nicholas came a couple years ago, July 2008, when church officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced a deal that would have allowed the church to be rebuilt about two blocks from its original location.
Port Authority agreed to give the church some land at Liberty and Greenwich streets and contribute $20 million toward construction of a new sanctuary.
And the Port Authority also agreed to build an explosion-proof platform and foundation for the new church building, which would sit on top of a screening area for cars and trucks entering the underground garages at the new World Trade Center.
Trouble emerged after St. Nicholas announced its plans to build a traditional Greek Orthodox church building, 24,000 square feet in size, topped with a grand dome.
Port Authority officials told the church to cut back the size of the building and the height of the proposed dome, limiting it to rising no higher than the World Trade Center Memorial.
The deal fell apart for good in March of 2009 when the Port Authority abruptly ended talks after refusing to allow church officials to review plans for the garage and screening area underneath.
16 months later, they still haven't met to resume negotiations.
So a Greek Orthodox church cannot be rebuilt, the only church that was there, while the impediments to building the mosque are removed.
Why doesn't Bloomberg do something?
Well, we have no, the Greeks don't hold us responsible for anything.
We have no reason to reach out to them.
I mean, the hell the Greeks, they're about to go the way of Pompeii anyway, falling into the ocean of debt, soon to be submerged.
What do we care about?
The Greeks.
We didn't make them mad.
The Greeks are not trying to wipe us out.
So why give them a staging area to do so?
No, not necessary.
Who's next?
This is Marilyn in Smithfield, Tennessee.
It's great to have you on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Thank you.
You're the Thomas Paine of this era.
And I hope you go down in history.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
People told Thomas Paine that he was the Rush Limbaugh of the future.
I believe it.
I'll believe anything you say because I know you're a truth teller.
I'm being driven crazy every time someone lawyer or someone on Fox News says that they have, that the Muslims have a right to build the mosque, they have a legal and constitutional right.
They do not.
And when the president states that the founders of this country meant them to have that right, founders of this country viewed the Constitution not as a decree, but as a contract.
Contract between the governed and the governing.
And when the governed break that contract, and the Muslims have broken this contract, they have used their houses of worship.
No other religion, not the Jews, not the Catholics, not the Hindus, have used their houses of worship to recruit and to foment hatred towards America.
Terrorists are recruited in these mosques.
When you break your side of the contract, as they have, then we have a right to say you are now coming under scrutiny and you will be denied the ability to do this.
The other point I want to make about the mosques, I'm a woman, and I'm a Christian.
I'm not allowed to attend services in their mosques.
Yeah.
Well, you can if you go to the basement of top floors and hide behind a wall.
Got to take a break.
Well, no, that's true.
We'll be back after this.
Islamic law requires men and women to be separated in a mosque.
The women can be that they're not allowed to lead prayers.
They can be in a separate room or unseen.
But they are allowed in.
I mean, I think that's a great acknowledgement of compassion tolerance.
The feminists of New York to accept something like that at ground zero.
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