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Aug. 30, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:38
August 30, 2010, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Let me start something here this hour and go nowhere with it.
How many of you have heard of Carolyn Wozniaki?
You've heard of her.
She's the number one seed among the women in the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
I I'm a sports fan.
Boy, they might be in there Michael, the post Michael Jordan era.
Serena Williams has got a sore foot and nobody knows she's gonna play.
And Carolyn Wozniaki, who is Polish descent and she's Danish, she's the number one seed in the women's U.S. Open.
I never thought that we go back to the days in which the men were better known than the women, but without the Williams sisters.
And Maria Sheropova, women's tennis doesn't have any superstars right now.
Carolyn Wozniaki is twenty years old, number one seed, women's division of the U.S. Open.
There's a lot of U.S. open players or staff or hangers on or meety or something staying at the hotel that they have me at.
I'm at EIB Central in New York, but I haven't I haven't talked to any of them because none of them appear to speak English.
Now let me get to the actual beginning of the hour.
I want to talk for a moment about the peace talks that President Obama is trying to get going between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
He's going to bring in the Egyptians as well.
Every president tries this.
Dating back to Nixon.
They all want to cut the deal that gets the Israelis and the Palestinians to live happily ever after.
So it's not surprising that President Obama is trying to do it.
After all, he'd like to actually get a win on something.
He'd like nothing more than a boss and Netanyahu to shake hands with himself in the middle, the great broker.
Finally, there would be a sign that his let's bring everybody together and talk, listen to me talk works.
The thing that's confusing about this is why Israel is doing it.
Benjamin Netanyahu is probably the most hardline president that Israel has had since and maybe even including Begin.
He's argued against this peace process since he's been in power and when he was out of power.
He's argued that all the deals that we've made with the Palestinians haven't brought us any peace.
So why are they doing it?
I've got a theory here, and it's buried in the last two paragraphs.
Newspaper story in today's New York Times.
I believe Israel is using these talks as a bargaining ship to deal with the real issue.
Maybe they're willing to concede something to the Palestinians.
Another promise not to build new settlements, something.
In exchange for a commitment from Egypt, the Palestinians themselves to come out and make a public statement against Iran developing nuclear weapons.
If they don't do that, I think Israel will walk away from the talks.
The other thing that Netanyahu can ask for, Mr. President, are you going to deal with the Saranian nuclear problem?
Or not?
If Israel is going to be asked to bend again with the Palestinians, then deal with this threat to us from the Iranians.
Other than that, I don't understand why Israel would be doing it, so I presume that there's got to be an agenda there for Netanyahu to do something that would help his own country.
The Iranian question is one that the president's been trying to sweep under the rug, and he's been telling the Israelis, look, they're still a year away.
Give us a year to deal with this.
The Israelis realize that the president hasn't done anything about the Iranian nuclear threat.
The president's not energized on the issue, he's not committed to it, and he realizes that his extending the hand isn't going to work.
So I think that's the real agenda between is behind Israel's cooperating and starting another round of peace talks with the Palestinians.
The president did finally end his vacation today, and he came out and he talked about the economy.
By the way, recovery's just around the corner.
It'll be any day now.
Hope everybody's recovery summer is going well.
I was here right before summer began, was the last time I came in and sat in for Rush.
Waiting for that recovery.
Now summer's about over.
Labor Day's the semi official end of summer.
Oh, I got another week for that recovery to.
Maybe it'll be recovery fall, then it'll be recovery winter.
We don't know when that recoveries, but it's going to be here soon.
If only, he said today, the Republicans in the Senate stop obstructing my jobs bill.
Jobs didn't we already pass a jobs bill?
What was the $816 billion stimulus?
Now we've got to do another one.
Because stimulus didn't work.
We've got to do more stimulus.
And you Republicans have got to stop obstructing this.
How many are there?
Is it 39 or 38 or 40 Republicans in the Senate right now?
41, 42, 43, whatever Scott Brown said he was going to become 41.
They're the reason that we don't have any employment growth in this country.
Those 41 Republicans in the Senate, they're the problem.
Not the overwhelming majority you have in the House, not the 59 Democratic senators, not the fact that you got everything you wanted with stimulus and spent the money precisely the way you and Pelosi and Reed wanted it to be spent.
It's because of these Republicans in the Senate.
This isn't going to work.
Do you think is there anybody in America who thinks that what we need for more jobs in America is another federal jobs bill?
Nobody believes that.
The reason stimulus didn't work is because virtually all the money was spent on make-work projects, government projects, or giving money to social service agencies to continue to do the stuff they already do.
Nothing was done in stimulus to make businesses want to take risks.
And that's what a hiring decision is.
You hire more employees when you have more things to do, when you have more work, when you have more business, when you see an opportunity to expand.
And businesses aren't hiring because they have no faith or confidence in the economy of this country.
They're taking a look at a president who's willing to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of the year.
They're looking at public policy that says they've got to give health insurance to their workers, and that health insurance is becoming more costly than it was only a few months ago.
They don't see any light at the end of the tunnel.
They don't want to take that risk.
They also see a president who's going to demonize them if their risk is successful.
We've got to soak the rich.
Look at the arguments for allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire.
Why that money all goes to the wealthy?
Well, in fact, much of it goes to small businesses and medium-sized businesses that file as individuals.
So if they do expand, if they do take on additional risk, and they're successful as a result, they merely have to give all of that money back to the government.
This is why businesses aren't hiring right now.
And no amount of federal carpet bombing of this country with more stimulus is going to change that.
Public sector employment doesn't end unemployment.
Because when you hire someone to a government job, you merely increase the burden on private taxpayers to be able to support that job.
It doesn't result in any growth.
Furthermore, the hiring of a public worker doesn't result in the creation of anything.
It doesn't get new dollars to turn around.
That government worker isn't making anything that's going to be sold.
That government worker isn't doing anything to invest in our economy.
They're merely performing a service.
Government employment is a neutral when it comes to dealing with the overall employment base.
When a factory, however, hires someone, that person's going to make something.
That thing then has to be hi has to be purchased by somebody else.
You have money turning over and changing hands, and you're not going to see the federal government have the ability to influence that at all, which brings me to housing.
I have the opinion, and not all conservatives share this, that this economy will not recover until housing gets out of the pit that it's in.
The latest housing numbers were terrible.
The housing market topped out three years ago.
And it's still showing no signs of recovery.
When you look at it from the outside, this doesn't make any sense.
All over America, And some parts of the country were hit harder by the housing bust than others.
But all over America, housing is less expensive than it was three years ago.
Mortgage rates are unbelievably low.
You can get a 30-year fixed mortgage right now in many cities for 4.5% or less.
The 15 and 20 year mortgages are less than that.
The cost of borrowing money is rock bottom.
When you take a look at your actual cost of housing, the difference between a payment on an 8.5% mortgage rate and a four and a half percent mortgage rate is enormous, especially if you finance over 30 years as most people do.
So why aren't people buying houses if the money is cheap and the cost of housing has gone down?
The problem is this.
When a person buys a house, they have to do something else.
Usually they have to sell their own house.
People are not confident that they can sell their own home, so they're not willing to go out and buy another house.
I believe that every house sale results in another two house sales.
When someone buys your house, you can then buy that person's house, and that person has to live somewhere, so they're going to buy a third house.
You need to have a s there's a snowball effect in housing.
And right now we have a reverse snowball.
Because no one's buying existing homes, the existing homeowner can't go out and buy another home.
There's no other explanation for the fact that housing is stalled.
And why aren't people willing to go out and buy houses?
It's the same problem businesses have.
People are afraid to take on any risk right now.
They do not have confidence in the American economy.
They see their taxes going up.
They see unemployment still at remarkably high numbers.
They're afraid they might lose their jobs.
You know, this recession has hit all income groups.
It's hit industries in areas that people never thought would be hit.
People are afraid to buy because nobody's buying.
They can't buy themselves, and we're stuck.
So what does this have to do with the larger economy?
Housing remains the most American of industries.
It's very, very hard for China to take over housing.
The builder has got to be an American because you can't have the house built in China and shipped out well.
Well, they probably are doing that now, and it's probably substandard.
You're bought, you're hiring an American builder, the plumbers are people who live in your own community, the electricians are people who hire who are in your own community.
The house that you're buying is from somebody who obviously already is in your own community.
When housing changes hands, it's activity that's going almost entirely within your own community and within the country.
That's a lot of dollars changing hands.
When housing is stalled, everything's going to be stalled.
So I think housing is inextricably linked to the larger economy.
And you could take interest rates right now down to two and a half percent, and I don't think people would buy.
If the banks literally said, I'll lend you 350,000 and all you have to pay back is 350,000.
Would people buy then?
I don't know that it would make a difference.
People are afraid of this government.
They are afraid to take a risk.
They're afraid the capital gains rates will change.
They're afraid that they're going to lose the housing deduction.
They're afraid of taking any kind of investment.
They're afraid of losing their own jobs.
So we're stuck.
There's no other explanation for it.
What I'd like to do is invite you to tell me why you think housing is stalled.
Because when you look at it from the outside, as I said, housing should be booming.
Normally, when things go down in price, people buy them.
Normally when the cost of something is down, it's attractive.
And since most Americans who buy homes still finance them with mortgages, when you see interest rates this low, people generally jump.
We had a nice blip up for a few months with the first time home buyer credit.
But that didn't result in really new housing come over.
That's just people who change the timing in order to get the uh the check that they got from the government.
Housing itself remains very, very sick.
And until people are willing to buy homes and people are willing to move out of their current home and move up, I don't see the American economy picking up either.
1 800 282 2882 is the telephone number.
Your theories on what's wrong with housing, and if you'd like to react to my premise that the American economy is going to be stalled as long as housing is stalled, we'll take your calls on that next.
I'm Mark Elling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Here's another problem.
I realize that if you're president of the United States, you don't have the same worries as do ordinary Americans.
But do you get any sense that this crowd in Washington or even the president can relate to housing decisions?
The only real house Barack Obama ever bought, he purchased because Honey Rezco bought the empty lot next to the house and paid the same price that he paid.
This isn't somebody who can relate to these decisions about taking risks.
He got a steal on a home because the property owner was willing to divide it into two parcels, and Tony Rezco, a felon, paid for the empty lot parcel that he never built anything on.
So how does this president relate to turning housing around?
People are afraid of losing their jobs.
Many of them are still upside down on their current mortgages.
And if you have no equity in your current home, how are you going to go out and buy another one?
So we're stalled.
And it's stalling the economy.
And the economy will not recover until people are willing to buy the most American of investments, which is another house.
Let's go to Kingsport, Tennessee, and Pat.
Pat, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Mark, uh, good afternoon to you.
Uh I you just stole my thunder.
But uh that was my impression was people are not buying houses uh because they're afraid tomorrow they're not gonna have a job.
That's hanging your think of most people.
Well, that that's hanging over this.
You have people that are losing jobs, not just in factories, but in white collar positions.
You've got companies that are downsizing.
There's the whole health care thing that's leading a lot of companies to consider whether or not they want to have the same number of employees that they have right now.
You're not going to make a com buying a house is taking a significant risk.
First of all, we don't have the appreciation that we had several years ago.
But secondly, you sign that mortgage, you're usually f agreeing to a house that you're going to be saddled with paying for over a 30-year period.
You're making a major commitment.
And who right now wants to make a commitment that has any kind of risk in it?
People are afraid to act because of this president and because of this Congress.
They look at the national debt, they look at they look at the stock market, which is already starting to give back some of the gains that it made over the last year.
There's no confidence in this at all.
And if you think you're going to lose your job, or if you think there's a chance you're going to lose your job, you're not going to go out and buy a more expensive home than you have right now.
And passing this stimulus package or lowering interest rates lower or having the Fed come in and buy bonds, all the stuff that Bernanke is talking about doing doesn't change that.
If people don't believe that their risk is going to work out, they're not going to take it.
Thank you for the call.
Hickory, North Carolina, and Robert.
Robert, it's your turn on the EIB network.
How are you doing, Mark?
I'm great, thanks.
You asked uh why people aren't jumping at these great rates.
And I'll tell you my situation.
Uh my wife and I are looking to buy a second house, a piece of investment property, and the money that we were going to use for a down payment four years ago, we had in our brokerage account.
It hasn't recovered.
I don't have the spare liquid cash to dump in, you know, putting down twenty percent or ten percent.
It'll just take my rainy day fund down too low to be comfortable.
And if interest rates drop to two percent, if you could get a 30-year mortgage at two percent, you probably wouldn't change your attitude because it isn't the cost of the mortgage that's stopping you from buying right now in the first place, is it?
No, the the cost of the money, it's I I'd I want to do it.
But right now, you know, my liquid cash isn't there.
It dried up, you know, three years ago when the stock market did.
And if the stock market goes down again, which it might, if this recession continues to fizzle, if recovery summer never happens and the stock market turns down again because corporate profits go down, we're already now at revised one point six percent growth.
That's the recovery that we have.
One point six percent growth, which is almost nothing.
You'll even be less likely to do it.
People took a real real hit.
And whether you blame it on Bush, you blame it on speculation in the housing market, you blame it on Barney Frank telling Freddie Mac and Fanny made a subsidized mortgage as it shouldn't have been subsidized.
We had a real downturn in our country.
And it's resulting in people not being willing to take on a risk of going out and buying an additional house, either moving up or buying the first house or whatever.
And I don't believe any of the policy changes that we're talking about in Washington are going to address that.
People don't feel comfortable taking on that additional risk.
The same problem is confronting industry.
Until people want to take a chance on their economy, they're not going to invest housing or otherwise.
And as long as that attitude exists, our economy's going to be in trouble.
Here's a beautiful headline from over the weekend Wall Street Journal.
Democrats face economic facts.
That's a first.
Democrats face economic facts, updraft unlikely.
The string of bad news about housing, employment, and economic growth has led Democrats to an inescapable conclusion.
The economy is not likely to improve in time to help them in the fall elections.
Congressional Democrats in the White House will continue their attempts to enact policies they believe will boost the economy, and which are also aimed at persuading voters they are working to make things better.
But some officials acknowledge it is too late for these initiatives to change the economic situation ahead of the November 2nd elections.
and then this one from USA Today.
Record numbering government anti-poverty programs.
Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand This is the liberal dream.
We're all on the dole.
More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid.
Remember, Medicaid is health care for low-income people, Medicare for the elderly.
More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid.
A survey of state data by USA Today shows.
Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record, says Vernon Smith of Health Management Association.
Fifty million on Medicaid.
Unemployment near 10%, the real unemployment rate, counting the people who are no longer counted in the statistics because they've given up, much higher than that.
Is it any wonder housing hasn't recovered?
Is it any wonder nothing has recovered?
You've got people on the dole, people who are out of work, Other people afraid of losing their jobs, and the response to all of this is the president pops out of the rose guard and blames it all on the Republicans and the Senate says we need we need to pass another jobs bill.
We need the government to stop scaring us to death that they're going to destroy our way of life.
And until that happens, nobody's going to invest in anything.
I'll take my own situation.
I think securely.
Do I want to bank on the fact that the president isn't going to take a bigger chunk out of my paycheck next year?
I think he is going to take a bigger chunk out of my paycheck next year.
The high end of the housing market is absolutely dead.
The middle end is sick.
The only part that you see moving at all is at the very, very bottom.
The inexpensive houses that people are able to use the old tax credit for.
Or people are willing to take a chance on because the price has crashed.
But even that part of the market isn't healthy.
Nobody wants to take a risk at all because they think they're going to be taxed more next year if they're making money.
If they're not making much money, they're fearful that they're going to lose their job entirely.
And you've got a president of the United States who thinks that the answer to all of it is to throw more money around to hire more government workers and keep more people need to be supported by tax dollars.
That's not a formula for housing to take off again.
And until people are willing to buy houses, I don't see the economy getting jump-started at all.
To Cedar City, Utah.
Jeff, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Hi.
I'm great.
Thanks.
I think there's another aspect to consider here on why things aren't moving, especially like in housing.
Lending requirements have gone from extremely liberal to overly tight.
It used to be, you know, the stated income process.
you know part was you know overly you know liberal, but now uh I saw Scott the other day that some uh uh a credit score, uh most a third of the country's credit scores dropped a hundred points.
Yeah.
Uh and then on top of that, FHA is requiring now to uh have more of a down payment and raising the credit score requirement.
Well, what happened was everybody's credit got trashed during the last housing downturn, so the credit scores got worse.
The banks are now requiring outstanding credit scores in order to get those really, really good mortgages, and you've got the federal government that's leaning on the banks.
You know, the we had the Democrats in Congress pushing federal housing policy that said every subprime mortgage should be issued.
They got Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae involved in all of this.
They wanted a loosened standard so that everybody could buy a and I admit the Republicans were party to this as well.
You had a situation in which as long as you were breathing, you could get a mortgage.
You didn't have to put anything down, you didn't have to show any reliability of income because housing was going up, everybody wanted to get involved in the loan.
Now it's just the opposite.
It's very hard to qualify for that preferred mortgage.
It's very hard to get credit because the government is leaning on all of these banks to improve their portfolios.
We went from begging banks, ordering banks to make mortgages, now to penalizing them if they do so.
Every part of our policy on housing right now is screwed up.
Even if you want to buy a house, you may not have sufficient credit to be able to do so.
Now, some of that is a good thing.
Credit was way too loose.
We threw out all the rules.
Nobody ought to get PMI insurance anymore.
You didn't have to put anything down.
You didn't have to show any stability of income.
As long as you came in and you wanted to buy something, the banks were willing to give you the money and the government was going to subsidize it through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
That's all changed.
And we now have a situation in which people are fearful of going out and investing in a home, and even if they have the desire to do so, they may not qualify for the mortgages that are there.
So then you wonder why we're stuck where we are.
Whether or not that holds down the entire economy is subject to debate, I admit.
I just think that American economy starts at the bottom and moves up.
Tax policy starts at the top and moves down.
In order to get a con this economy moving, you're going to need Americans to invest.
Private citizens and private businesses.
There's no more priming of the pump by the Fed or by Obama that's going to do any good.
People have to have the desire and the ability to spend and invest.
And the government can't make them do that.
You can lecture and lecture and lecture that this is a great time to go out and buy housing.
If people don't have the guts to do it or they don't have the wherewithal to get the money, they're not going to move forward.
Thank you for the call.
Francis, in Ontario Canada, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Yeah, good day, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
Thank you.
I uh I do agree that uh, you know, uh it looks like now would be a great time to buy.
Your prices are low, your interest rates are low.
Uh uh, and I can certainly give you an outside view on it.
Uh my wife and I are in a position um where we would like to purchase.
We were looking at purchasing something in Florida.
The prices are there.
Um but it's it it's a gauge of consumer confidence.
When you have your prices this low and you have your interest rates this low.
I mean, I wouldn't know the interest rates wouldn't affect myself personally so much.
But I mean it it shows a lack of consumer confidence.
Basically, people expect, fully expect that the prices are going to drop further, and that the interest rates are going to drop further.
I myself concerned about that.
That's the snowball that I was referring to before.
So long as people are fearful of the economy, they're not going to be willing to invest.
If they don't invest, that means they don't buy a house that's either in foreclosure or owned by somebody else, so you're delaying another sale.
We've got to get confidence coming back again.
The other thing that's hanging over all of this is the stock market, which is still the biggest single vehicle for savings on the part of the American people.
So you've got nobody willing to go out and buy a house.
You've got people who are afraid to sell their own house because they don't know what their own situation is, and everything's just stuck.
Now you mentioned Florida.
There's overwhelming supply in the Florida housing market, especially if you want to buy a condo.
They built all of these units and they can't move them.
You can go in and get these things for a song.
But who is willing to take that risk right now?
And I don't think Fed policy is going to change that.
And I don't think passing another jobs bill is going to change that.
Thank you for the call.
Now I do have a theory of something that could turn this around.
I don't know what's going to happen with the stock market.
Nobody does.
I'm pessimistic because of the amount of debt that we have.
On the other hand, the stock market is very psychological.
I think it's possible that as we get closer to the November election, that you may see a pickup in the stock market because of an anticipation that some of the Obama policies will be delayed and others could be reversed.
For example, on health care.
You can't repeal it so long as Obama has the veto pen.
What you can do is refuse to fund it.
If there's a belief by corporate America that Obamacare can be delayed or even eventually repealed, you might see the stock market pick up, which would really help that consumer confidence number that people are talking about.
If people see their own personal savings start to recover, maybe they will feel better about things and they'll move forward.
The same thing happened with Clinton's presidency.
Once the Republicans got control of the Congress, it stopped Clinton's ability to move as far to the left as he sought to go in his first two years.
The economy then did improve.
The Republicans also reduced the capital gains rate, and Clinton signed the bill.
It may be that getting some Republicans elected to Congress, particularly if they can take control of one house, will help out the stock market and will improve the consumer confidence numbers and turn things around.
I'm not sure that's going to happen.
I'm just saying that it's possible that it might occur.
If people see light at the end of the tunnel, and that light means something other than the rule that we're part of right now, you might get people to loosen their wallets at least a little bit.
But so long as housing is nowhere in this country, I don't see the American economy recovering because housing is the most critical part we have.
It touches everyone.
It's the largest single purchase most people will ever make.
The people that they hire and pay a lot of money to, the builders and the developers and the plumbers and the electricians and everybody else, the people who get the proceeds of a sale and then turn around and put it into something else, that's an enormous amount of money changing hands.
And people aren't doing it right now, even though mortgage rates are cheaper than they've ever seen, and housing prices are lower than they were as far back as even ten years ago.
To disconnect that from the lack of confidence in the leadership of this country is silly.
The biggest single problem with housing, and I think housing's the biggest single problem with the economy, is the president himself and the American public's fear of what he's going to do next.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
This isn't going to happen, so we'll never know if I'm right.
But what if tomorrow President Obama, flanked by Pelosi and Reed, got up and said, We've heard what you're saying, America.
We're going to make the Bush era tax cuts permanent.
What do you think the stock market would do over the next four months?
I believe it would explode upward.
That would improve consumer confidence, since most people's retirement includes at least partial exposure to the stock market.
What would happen to the housing market?
I believe it would be much better six months from now than it is right now.
I think it would especially help the middle and upper part of the housing market.
We don't know that because they're not going to do it.
The best we can hope for is that they'll make some of the Bush tax cuts extend for a period of time.
It's my belief that if he wants to turn the economy around, he'd do it.
You know what the difference between Obama and Clinton is?
I don't know that politically they were that different.
Clinton cared about Clinton.
He was a political creature, didn't most focused on self-preservation.
I think Bill Clinton would have taken any position in order to get re-elected.
That's his finger was constantly up in the air.
The difference between him and Obama is I think Obama is a true believer.
I think Obama doesn't care as much about his political prospects as he does his ideology.
Clinton didn't give a rip about ideology.
That's why he was willing to throw Hillary Kerr off over the off the edge when he realized that that was hurting him.
For President Obama to do something as radical as extend the Bush tax cuts is unthinkable.
But admit it, you could see Clinton doing it.
You could see Clinton doing it just so he could take credit for the recovery that would occur.
I don't see Obama having the same survival instincts.
The good news is he's probably a one-term president.
The bad news is he's going to be a one-term president because he hasn't learned anything from his mistakes of the first year and a half.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
They had the Emmy Awards for television last night.
Looking at the list of winners here, comedy series, Modern Family, Drama Series, Mad Men, Actor in a Comedy, The Big Bang Theory, Actor in a Drama, Breaking Bad.
Nobody watches these programs.
Remember when they gave out the Emmys to shows that everybody watched?
There's something profound happening in American television.
Nobody watches the same unless it's a reality show like America, competition show like American Idol or one of those, dancing with the Stars.
Nobody watches it anymore.
Here are the ratings from last week.
The most watched over the year television program, not cable, but regular broadcast television, was a pro football preseason game between the Vikings and 49ers and NBC.
Its rating was 6.7.
That's number one.
6.7 used to mean that you were in last.
Ratings in television, that's a percentage of the number of households with television, 6.7%.
The households with television were watching that football game, and that was number one.
That means the most watched program of the week was not watched in 93.3% of American homes.
We've got no shared experience at all anymore.
Second and third place America's got talent on Tuesday, third place America's got talent on Wednesday.
A rerun of NCIS finished fourth.
On cable, the top rated program was the closer, by the way, Kiris Sedwick finally won an Emmy last night for the closer.
4.4 rating.
So cable's catching up to the over the air broadcast programs.
Mad Men, three years in a row now.
It's one for best drama, yet its ratings are microscopic.
Most people don't watch madmen.
The people who've tuned it in because of all the hype turn it off because they don't like it.
I happen to think that it's a great show, but I know why people don't like it.
They can't relate to any of the characters because they all seem bad.
There's nobody that they like.
Can't warm up to the program.
You contrast that with some conservative talk shows right now.
This is an important point I'm about to make.
Russia's program is listened to by many times more than the most watched single television program of the week.
It's got to be that some conservative talk show hosts are offering up something that the public wants.
As for television right now, it's so split up and so fragmented that there are no hits anymore.
There is no shared experience, and television is becoming less fundamental to our own definition of what our culture is.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush.
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