Stand by, if you would, on audio soundbite number 28.
I'm in the mood to listen to a sissy.
And we have an audio soundbite here from Julian Assange, who looks like a sissy and is a sissy.
It was from yesterday in Amman, Jordan, at the third annual conference for Arab Investigative Journalists.
How cool is this?
The third annual conference for Arab Investigative Journalists.
And Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, spoke.
And there was a question during the Q ⁇ A.
The information you have released and are about to release could put people at risk not only with the State Department or in Britain, but in the areas that you are already suffering the atrocities of war.
When you weigh out the risks versus the outrage your project has sparked and the change it's made, what is your assessment?
It understands that we are a responsible organization.
So it's trying to make it as hard for us as possible to publish responsibly in the hope that it can get us to not publish anything at all.
Because not publishing anything at all would mean not publishing the abuses by that organization.
I don't believe that for a minute.
This is a problem.
I don't think the State Department is trying to get this guy not to publish anything.
Do you?
Look, in the old days, if they didn't want you to publish something, you didn't publish it.
They found a way.
If they really didn't want you to publish something, I just love this guy.
Well, the State Department understands that we are a responsible organization, so it's trying to make it as hard for us as possible to publish responsibly.
No, I just don't like the guy on general principles.
I don't like the name.
I don't like the way he looks.
I don't like the way he sounds.
He's a sissy.
He's a waif.
It's purely and simply an internet creation.
Greetings, folks.
Great to have you.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Great to have you with us.
Telephone number, if you want to join us, 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushbaugh at EIBNet.com.
Now look at this.
This is from the Associated Press.
It is from yesterday.
And it's in their energy writer.
How to prep your home for an electric car is the headline.
The sub-headline, to avoid potential power outages, check your wiring.
Oh, and get this.
I learned sometime last week that electric car manufacturers are having to give training to EMS personnel, emergency medical responders and so forth on how not to get electrocuted when you come upon the car in an accident and you have to tow it or get people out of it.
But that's not the half of it.
Listen, this is just kind of like Dennis Miller had a great line on these compact fluorescent light bulbs.
I'll have to paraphrase it.
I don't remember exactly what it was.
But he said, I have not worked all of my life to have my house filled with lights that look like the kind of cheap lights that light stairways in James Bond movies.
Dank little lights in these stairways where the bad guys hang out.
All right?
Getting your home ready to charge an electric car will either require a little time or money, a couple of months and thousands of dollars.
A couple of months and thousands of dollars to get your home ready to charge an electric car.
It depends on what kind of electric car you buy, the wiring in your home, and how quickly you want to juice your ride.
Now, I'd assume that you want to be able to juice your ride the day you get it.
Electric cars are powered by batteries that are charged by plugging them into a standard wall socket or a more powerful charging station.
The charging station will cut your charging time roughly in half and reduce the chance that you'll trip a circuit in your house.
But it'll probably cost $2,000 or more, including installation.
The price will rise if you need a new electrical panel, which could add another $2,000.
The main thing to consider is how you're going to use your electric car.
If your commute is short or there's a charging station near your office, you might not need much of a charge at home.
You can get away with topping off your battery overnight, provided you have room and that the boss isn't using the charging station for his electric car.
A standard 120-volt wall socket will give your car about five miles of driving for every hour of charging.
That means if you had a 40-mile round-trip commute, you'd be able to charge in eight hours.
So, you have in most cars, most electric cars, a 40 to 50 mile per charge distance, depending, of course, on speed.
And then it's eight hours to charge it to do that.
All right, now that's where we are now.
If you deplete your battery all the way, most days, a charging station that is connected to a 240-volt socket, like ones used for most electric clothes dryers, could be worthwhile.
The $41,000 Chevrolet Volt and the $33,000 Nissan the Leaf are set to go on sale next month.
Buyers qualify for a federal tax credit of $7,500 because they have to be paid to buy these cars.
And additional and local state subsidies in some cases might apply.
You might end up being paid $10,000 to buy one of these cars.
To date, Apple has not paid me a penny to buy 20 years worth of their products.
Nor have they ever been on sale.
But that's another story.
And Apple products use electricity, by the way.
Now, the Volt and the Leaf have two different batteries and different charging requirements.
Scott Little, 62, an experimental physicist from Austin, Texas, has reserved a Nissan Leaf, but he's not going to install a charger because of what he calls its ridiculous price.
The idea, the idea of paying $2,000 for what amounts to a dryer plug irritates a guy like me.
He said instead he's going to use his wall socket for a while and eventually install chargers himself at his home and his farm 40 miles away.
So the idea of paying $2,000, wait till he finds out what it's going to cost him to charge the damn thing.
A battery like this plugged into your wall for eight hours?
The bottom line here is you're going to have to upgrade your house to efficiently charge your brand new electric car.
Hubba hubba hubba.
Here's the story.
If the house catches on fire, who do you sue?
Well, if your house catches on fire when you're charging your iPhone, who do you sue?
Well, you don't sue anybody, do you?
You just, well, you might.
I don't know.
People's houses catch on fire with electrical problems, gas problems.
I don't know who you sue.
You go to the insurance company and they pay off and then cancel you.
We'll wait for that to happen.
You know, there's going to be a giant class action lawsuit or something when this happens.
It's going to be fun to watch.
All these fabsters involved here.
Anyway, here's the story that I mentioned earlier.
Secondhand smoke kills more than 600,000 people worldwide every year, according to a new study.
In the first look at the global impact of secondhand smoking, researchers analyzed data from 2004 for 192 countries.
They found 40% of children and more than 30% of non-smoking men and women regularly breathe in secondhand smoke.
The study was paid for by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and Bloomberg Philanthrophies.
This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco, said Armando Peruga, program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study.
He said that approximately 603,000 deaths from secondhand smoking should be added to the 5.1 million deaths that smoking itself causes every year.
Okay, now, we have in our archives, in our essential stack of stuff at rushlimbaugh.com, we have a World Health Organization study that was suppressed when it came out.
We have it.
And I want Coco Jr. to link it back in the homepage today.
World Health Organization did a massive worldwide study of secondhand smoke, and they found it has no impact at all.
Zilch Zero Nada.
And it was suppressed.
You can't find it.
We have it.
We kept it.
We copied it ourselves, not relying on their websites.
this is I mean this is pure bunk this is all of this it's just a crock I look at this kind of stuff.
This debate's been going on for 30 years.
I don't know how many people have been around secondhand smoke all their lives.
This is just, it's all lies.
It's what the left does.
Lies about our light bulbs, lies about global warming, and now lies about this.
All for the express purpose of ending up controlling people's lives.
That report that I talked about, we first revealed it March 22nd of 2001.
Secondhand smoke is harmless.
Passive smoking doesn't cause cancer official.
That's the headline, and we'll link to it.
Well, we've got it.
It's in our essential stack of stuff, but we'll make it prominent on our webpage this afternoon so that you can look it up tonight when you get around to it.
By the way, secondhand smoke had its biggest effect on who?
According to the story, no, women.
And then children.
Women and children hardest hit.
And the secondhand smoke impact.
Now, let's say this is from a Florida Sun Sentinel, South Florida Sun, Fort Lauderdale.
Medicare admits overpaying for common items like wheelchairs.
Here's the story.
Medicare pays $800 to rent a wheelchair that retails for $350.
You can buy one for $350.
Medicare rents it for $800.
Medicare spent $188 million on manual wheelchairs in 2009.
Officials cannot say how much of that involved overpayments.
Who's responsible for this is Congress.
This story, classic illustration of what happens when the government gets in the way of the free market.
Great example, how out of whack the whole Medicare process is, and how the people in government have frigged it up just like they're about to screw up all of healthcare.
Alan Siegel of Fort Lauderdale discovered the overspending recently when he needed to replace a wheelchair for his wife.
He wanted to buy one since she suffers from a form of muscular dystrophy and requires permanent use of a wheelchair.
But Medicare only covers the cost to rent one for up to 13 months.
After that, the chair belongs to the patient.
Two months into Siegel's rental, he learned just how much Medicare was paying.
The total cost over the course of the rental would be $800.
He checked further and found the chair being rented cost less than $350.
I had the supplier stop the rental and I bought the damn thing.
It's ridiculous for Medicare to spend so much more for a rental in situations when a cheaper purchase makes so much more sense.
It is ridiculous.
And this is, I'm sure, one of a thousand million examples throughout government, not just wheelchairs, but everything else practically.
An internet search shows that those prices are at least twice the retail cost, in some cases much more.
A lightweight wheelchair similar to the one Siegel bought is available for as little as $99, eight times less than the Medicare rent price.
For more than 20 years, Medicare has used a fee schedule set by Congress to determine reimbursement rates for wheelchairs and other medical equipment.
The fees are based on the average amount that equipment suppliers charged Medicare in 1986.
See, folks, how much if you just paid for it yourself, this guy, Larry, pay for it himself.
Easy for you to say, Limbaugh.
I know.
I'm sorry.
Forgive me.
I know it makes me the bad guy.
There was a story in the Washington Post on Friday.
And I don't think too many people saw this because on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, what are you doing?
You're sleeping, you're shopping, cyber shopping, you're watching football, whatever you're doing, but the last thing you're doing is probably reading the Washington Post.
Well, get this.
Doctors say Medicare cuts force painful decision about elderly patients.
I read this story and I was in stunned disbelief.
Well, I wasn't because it didn't surprise me, but it was in stunned disbelief nevertheless that it's happening.
You want an appointment with kidney specialist Adam Weinstein of Eastern Maryland.
If you're a seasoned citizen covered by Medicare, the wait is eight weeks.
It's no longer the UK and Canada that are the horror stories.
They are happening here now.
Eight weeks for a seasoned citizen to get an appointment with a kidney specialist.
Some cases, you don't have eight weeks, depending on how bad your kidney is in.
How about a checkup from geriatric specialist Michael Trejos?
Expect to see him once every six months.
He's an Alexandria-based doctor.
He's been limiting most of his Medicare patients to twice yearly rather than four times a year that he considers ideal.
Still, at least he'll see you.
Top-ranked primary care doctor Linda Yao is one of three doctors with the district's Foxhall Internist Group who recently announced they will no longer be accepting Medicare patients, period.
It's not easy, she said, but you realize you either do this or you don't stay in business.
Excuse me, doctors across the country describe similar decisions, complaining that they've been forced to shift away from Medicare toward higher-paying, privately insured or self-paying patients in response to years of penny pinching by Congress.
And that's not even taking into account a long postponed rate-setting method that's on track to slash Medicare payment to rates to doctors by 23% more on December 1st.
Maybe they need to be looking into that $188 million spent on just wheelchairs last year, of which two-third is an overpayment.
So, what's happening?
Very simply, Medicare doctors are opting out.
They can't stay in bidness on what the government's paying them.
And they are cutting the number of times per year they will even see a patient.
Even emergency cases now, like a kidney problem, you can be in line eight weeks.
It's not just the UK.
And you want to know the sad truth?
All this is by design.
Once this actually begins to happen to a large number of seasoned citizens, and remember, I saw a story, we got a call coming up about this.
Alan Simpson said that the older generation is a bunch of selfish people, called the selfish generation.
These seasoned citizens are expecting all this medical care for nothing.
Well, regardless whether they're that or not, when en masse they start saying, I wanted to get to the doctor, the doctor won't see me and my mother died because, guess who we'll see on TV with a big smile when he says it'll be Obama?
Well, see, we're going to have to set up a public option, single payer, only way we can deal with this.
Now, this Washington Post story, and I just referenced from last Friday on how Medicare doctors are opting out because they're not being paid enough.
They're going to patients that pay themselves or high insurance patients.
Not once in this story will you read the word Obamacare.
Not once will you see the name Obama.
Not once will you hear national health care reference at all.
This is just, you know, this is happening out there.
I want no explanation as to why.
And the reason for this is quite simple.
These seasoned citizens, when the doctors won't see them, are going to start clamoring for something.
And Obama's going to be right there.
See, these doctors are mean.
We told you from the get-go.
The doctors are in for it themselves.
The doctors don't care.
The hospitals don't care, but I do.
And that's why we're going to make sure that the government doesn't let you down.
The government will handle it.
But the problem is that the public option is just Medicare for everybody.
So the same problems exist.
So pretty soon the doctor is not going to see any of us but twice a year, unless you can pay for it yourself.
Pretty soon the doctor is not going to see any of us, depending on the ailment, but twice a year or once every eight weeks.
Because the public option is Medicare for everybody.
So Obama's solution for the Medicare problem is more Medicare.
Let's have more of it.
Pure and simple.
Be his solution for everything.
Such temporary reprieves have increased the potential paid down the road, compounding not only the eventual cut, but the cost of doing away with it for good.
Now estimated in the tens of billions, physicians are having to make really gut-wrenching decisions about whether they can afford to see as many Medicare patients, said Cecil Wilson, president of the American Medical Association.
Oh, yeah, it's very tough out there.
Really, really tough.
Here's another guy, some guy named Berenson, who co-authored a study at the Urban Institute.
The argument that doctors literally can't afford to feed their kids if they take Medicare rates is absurd.
It's just that doctors have gotten used to a certain income and lifestyle.
All right, fine.
Let's dump on the doctors here, but then let's ask a question.
Why is it axiomatic that doctors ought to not get paid for what they do?
Because it's health care, and we all have a right to it.
Why?
At some point, then Obama is going to say none of us should get paid for what we do.
First the doctors, then everybody else.
And if you're on Medicare, it's illegal to pay any extra money.
If you are on, and if you're a Medicare doctor, you can't take private paying patients.
No, they've got to opt out.
All this, sadly, my friends, by design, here's Kevin in Missoula, Montana.
Nice to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Well, thank you.
It's an honor to speak with you.
Thank you, sir.
I wanted to comment on that Alan Simpson statement, and I'm a little nervous here.
What was it he actually said?
I don't have the exact statement.
Well, I think you pretty much quoted it as it is.
And my comments on that is Alan Simpson being a former senator of many years, it always drew the conclusion that he himself was part of the selfish government, elected government people who probably went out and told all his constituents that he was going to keep all benefits for future generations.
And now, as he is on the government deficit reduction committee, he is an almighty man who now says everybody else is the problem.
You hear what Alan Simpson said?
He said, you can't listen to people on talk radio like Rush Babe.
I mean, they couldn't get elected in their lifestyle, but they couldn't govern their way out of a paper sack is what Alan Simpson said about me.
Well, Rush Babe.
How I view people like Alan Simpson, when he makes a statement that the senior citizens are the selfish one, I say that he's the selfish one because he's the one who was not proactive when he was in the Senate.
We all knew this day of reckoning was coming.
Everybody knew it.
Here it is today.
Alan Simpson is one of the blue-blood country club Khrushchev Republicans that have helped get us into this point where we are today.
Well, there is, I can understand that argument you're making.
A lot of people would agree with you on that.
But I wish I could remember his exact quote because it was something along the lines that they're not the greatest generation, they're the most selfish generation, but it wasn't greediest.
It was the greediest.
That's what he said.
He called them the greediest generation.
And oh, Kevin here was going to ask me what I thought about that.
I have deftly moved on, if you've noticed.
What do I think about his claim about the greediest?
I don't think that there is a greediest generation in the way that Alan Simpson babe means it.
But I do, if you've been listening carefully the last month, you do know that I think that we have way too many people who think that they are entitled to stuff just because they're Americans.
And I don't think it's generational.
If you look at, he's talking about the greatest, the World War II bunch.
And I know the argument of the World War II bunch is that, yeah, they saved the nation.
They're a great bunch of self-reliant people, and something happened to them.
And after the World War II, if they saved them, it became called the Greatest Generation.
They said, okay, pay us.
This is the argument made about them, that they're the ones demanding freebies here, freebies there, Social Security, Medicare, all this kind of stuff.
They want this, and they vote for it and all that.
That's an argument made about them.
Not by me.
But I do think, as you know, we've got a rising problem in the country of expectation on the part of way too many citizens.
I don't care what generation they're from.
I don't know that it's greedy.
It's just they expect everything to be bought for it.
It's like these students running around.
If college costs too much, then you don't go.
I mean, it's the way it used to be.
If a car you wanted to buy costs more than you could afford, you bought a different kind.
If you can't go to a major university, that's no big problem, by the way.
It's probably not that harmful.
Go find a junior college.
There's nothing that says you can't get educated if you don't go to some so-called highfalutin university.
You can get educated in all kinds of ways.
But the idea that how do you, in one way, as far as these little crumb crunchers are concerned, they've been told from the moment they've been able to understand English that education is the single most important thing.
They've heard their parents talk about it, politicians talk about it.
It's the only thing that matters.
If you don't get an education, you're a dimwit failure.
You have no chance.
And so they've been scared into believing that that's true.
And then when they come across the come to realization they can't pay for it, then they panic and want somebody else, the very people telling them how important it is.
Well, then you pay for it for us if we can't, because you're the one telling us we can't get anywhere without it.
So in a way, these people that have been building up education as an end-all to every problem sort of have themselves to blame in part with all these people demanding one.
It's no different than if everybody in your life had been telling you that the way out of misery is to learn how to fix a car, then that's what you'd want to do.
So, I don't know.
It's a tough call out there, certainly, on this greediest generation business.
And you had a president, you had LBJ promising people, a great society, the war on poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, student aid, student loans, all this stuff has been promised to these people.
A retirement has been promised to people.
The Democrat Party, the Democrat Party, the American left have been promising people a panacea, a utopia.
And then when those same people pull it away from them, they're going, I want it.
I want it.
You give it to me.
You told me it was mine.
And then they start rioting and they blow up bank buildings and throw rocks through trees and whatever else they do.
And they irritate self-reliant people like me.
Well, I know, I know.
This is what Alan Simpson Babe is forgetting: that the seasoned citizens paid into this.
They've paid their FICA.
They've had the Social Security payments.
They think they've been paying for their Medicare.
They bought all that.
They bought that this was a retirement plan.
They bought it.
People like me, the self-reliant, have never believed that somebody else other than me is going to pay for my retirement.
I'm sorry if it makes me a bad guy, but I've never believed it.
It's like when I watch the TV show, The Millionaire, that that guy, Michael, whatever he said, was going to knock on my door someday.
I knew it was never going to happen.
And if somebody did knock on my door offering me a million bucks, the stuff I was going to have to do for it was stuff I would never do.
It just doesn't happen.
But a lot of people, from the time they were young people, have been told it does happen.
It will be their life.
It will be their reality.
So now this is interesting.
What is this?
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
It's from a blog.
ChiComs are trying to plug WikiLeak.
Can the world's most elaborate censorship system put the clamps on the internet's most prolific source of confidential information?
A day after IckyLeaks began to release a quarter million diplomatic cables sent from U.S. embassies, propaganda authorities in Beijing appear to be trying to control how much of the content of those cables leaks through to the Chinese public.
As of Monday evening in Beijing, the IckyLeaks cablegate page was blocked by China's great firewall, a rudimentary first step in the Chikom's censorship checklist.
More significantly, Chikom news media have received orders not to report on the IckyLeaks dump.
Contained in the cables are assertions that could make things awkward between the Chikoms and the U.S., including suggestions that Chikoms ignored a U.S. request to stop transfers of ballistic missile technology to Iran.
We knew this was none of this is why I say this is a surprise.
We knew the Chikoms are sending stuff over to the Iranians.
We knew this.
This stuff just confirms it in almost an undeniable form.
State Department cables.
As I said, very few people lie in their cables.
They lie to their diaries in the Clinton administration, but not to their cables.
People generally don't lie to their State Department cables.
So I think we've got the problem here.
Let's find Julian Assange and give him to the Chikoms.
And let's tell the Chikoms that he, what is he?
He's, what can we say he is?
He's Falun Gong.
We'll tell the Chikoms that he practices Falun Gong and they'll put him in a hard labor camp.
And if all we'll have to do is tell them, whether they believe it or not, they'll accept it.
Oh, Assange Fulong Gong.
Fine.
We'll gong his falloon, and we'll put him away.
Or tell the Chikongs that he's a Hmong.
Something like that.
Now, what's in the Chikoms, the Chikoms have their mouth shorts in a knot over this.
The Chikoms are not happy about it.
The Obama regime, I don't think they really care, but the Chikoms are not keen here.
They don't mind people suspecting they're giving nuclear weapons and stuff to the Iranians, but they have it confirmed.
So, whoever wants to curry favor with the Chikoms, find Assange.
Turn him over.
Well, I love that.
Might have to get into this in a little bit more detail tomorrow because this is funny.
This is a story from the day before Thanksgiving in Politico.
And this is, this is, I love this.
First lady of the United States' White House is not Camelot.
And they're not happy about this.
The inside the Beltway state-controlled media, very upset that Michelle Maybell is not turning the White House into a big social event and occasion and location.
The reality is of Washington make that difficult.
We're in an era where it's hard to recreate Camelot.
People are increasingly cynical about politics.
It's really a partisan world.
I don't think either party would allow the president of the opposite party, the first lady, to enjoy that kind of existence.
Oh, so the only reason why the Obamas are not Camelot is because the Republicans are not letting them.
Right.
Anyway, they're lamenting this story that Michelle has not turned it into Camelot.
But folks, as I said, I have more detail on this.
The expectations were high for a different kind of first lady.
Different from what?
What's she different from?
Camelot Schlamelot.
The one thing you can't get away from in class is class.
It's just that simple.
Yeah, I like that idea.
Give over Julian Assange to the Chai Cons, tell him he's falloon gong, because you know, no matter what happens, Eric Holder would never put Assange in Gitmo, which would also be a good place.