That's the way it always used to be in the NFL until that got chickified.
That was a tradition.
Do you know when the NFL used to be able to tackle by the face mask?
Oh, in the NFL, you used to be able to clothesline guys.
You could just forearm them right in the throat back in the old 50s and 60s.
Horse collar, all that stuff.
It was all legal.
You could beat people up back then.
Chuck Bednerick beat the crap out of Chuck Noel once.
Noel played for the Browns, Bednerick for the Eagles.
Last night, Roethlisberger gets his nose broken, no flag.
Keith Miller, big-time helmet-to-helmet concussion, no flag.
Late hit on Rothlessberger, no flag.
That was, it was not a, it was a sloppy game last night, but it was a real football game.
I mean, that was, that was a war of attrition.
And tonight, you got the Jets and the Patriots up in Foxborough.
Well, Tom Brady's 25-and-zip, 25-0 in the regular season at Foxborough in the last 25 games.
Well, you'd have to be 25-0 in the last 25 games.
This is the weak spot, the weak spot tonight is the Patriots' defense.
It's just normally, this is years past, the defense has been one of the strong suits for the Patriots.
Not so this year.
One of the problems that the Jets are going to have is, frankly, I thought the Ravens last night would do something that they didn't.
Maybe they tried to.
I thought they'd spread the Steelers out and really work on the Steelers' corners like the Patriots did when they beat them.
But now that Randy Moss is no longer there, there's no longer one big go-to guy.
You got three tight ends they rotate.
You got a couple of smurf wide receivers out there that can barely be seen, Deion Branch and this Tate guy.
And so who do you put your number one cornerback on?
Darrell Rivas.
They lost Jim Leonard to a broken shin in practice on Friday.
The Jets did.
But there are four elite teams in the AFC, the Steelers, the Ravens, the Jets, and the Patriots.
And all four of them, last night, two of them played tonight, too.
I don't know, but I've been looking forward to last night and tonight, NFL-wise, for a couple of weeks.
Yeah, well, straight up, yeah, I'd go with New England.
I think Tom Brady is the best quarterback National Football League.
I don't think there's any question about it.
There's no question about it.
There's no real question about it, snurdly.
If you strip away media bias and so forth out of it all, there's no, look at the numbers.
There's no comparison.
Tom Brady is the best quarterback in the NFL.
Who, who?
You think Peyton Manning, is that who you would put up there?
Well, you can't, you can't, I'm looking, I'm not trying to take anything away from Peyton Manning.
Don't misunderstand.
Peyton Manning's the media favorite.
Brady, a close second, but Belichick runs a tight ship up there.
And those guys don't do a lot of talking.
And so what they do on the field has to speak for them.
You know, Brady doesn't call reporters.
Peyton Manning does.
Lord, I love both of them.
Don't misunderstand.
I'm just as a purist.
Brady is the, he's difference in the game.
All right, WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks.
If you noticed something, folks, by the way, you know who this is.
You know what we do.
That's why I don't introduce the hour every hour because you already know.
WikiLeaks.
Up until recently, this WikiLeaks guy was a whistleblower.
Julian Assange, a whistleblower, but now that some of these leaks involve Hillary and the fraud that was global warming, now this guy, he's not a whistleblower.
He's a muckraker.
He's a guided missile.
And you know what the real downfall of this is going to be?
There's going to be a tightening on internet freedom.
You watch.
Because of this, somebody in this regime is going to propose tightening down on regulations and net neutrality is going to come along and so forth.
That's going to be the upshot of all this.
Not a good thing.
But I want to know, in addition to all these stories that we're getting now about Hillary and spying on UN people, which, by the way, is the job of people at the UN.
It's the job of nations to spy on each other.
The Soviet embassy in Washington is one of the highest parts, highest parts of the city.
Best antennas, but Soviets.
I'll tell you a little story.
Just to show you.
Back in 1986 or 87, when I was in Sacramento, they were frustrated that I didn't do guests on my show.
So they sent me to Washington for a week to do guests.
I did the program out of the ABC Bureau on DeSales Street, right across the street from the Mayflower Hotel.
And I was scheduled to have Vitaly Churkin, who was a Soviet spy, who routinely appeared on Nightline, and he worked at the embassy and so forth.
And I call him and I made the arrangements.
And then the night before the interview, I start talking to the ceiling in my hotel room, begging him not to cancel, knowing full well that he was listening in in my room and the Soviet agency, Soviet embassy, was spying on me.
That's just what they do.
We spy, you go to the UN.
I mean, if we're not spying on those thugs, then there's no reason to go there.
Sorry, this is not news, but it doesn't look good.
You know, Mrs. Clinton's in the process of rehabbing her image here.
You know, from the Nurse Ratchet days, she's rehabbing, and all of a sudden she's a spy.
Liberals don't like that.
And now climate change, we're finding out how bogus the whole thing always was.
So now they're really gunning for this Julian Assange guy.
And all of a sudden, like this, what I want to know is, where are the WikiLeaks documents to prove that 9-11 was an inside job by George Bush and Dick Cheney?
Let me ask you, liberals, where are these cables?
If Julian Assange is worth his salt, why did he produce that?
Produce all this stuff that you kooks believe.
Where are the documents that prove Bush intentionally lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to invade the country?
Where is the WikiLeaks document, the State Department cable, whatever, that Rove leaked Valerie Plain's name to the media?
Where's all this good stuff?
Where is, you know, I want to ask this to the Reverend Jackson.
Where are the WikiLeaks cables proving that the CIA invented AIDS?
Where is Obama's birth certificate?
Where's the real good stuff?
How about all the hundreds of other left-wing lies we've been hearing about for years?
WikiLeaks covering up for the United States.
And I got a kick out of this lead paragraph from the AP concerning WikiLeaks stuff.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton knows how to try to get a laugh from a public embarrassment.
I'll say she does.
She's been doing it for decades.
I mean, the headline is Clinton uses WikiLeaks disclosures to draw a laugh.
Well, she's got plenty of experience in that.
I don't know.
I just, I get a kick out of all this stuff.
Where's all the good stuff?
This Assange guy is just not worth his salt.
Retiring Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington, said that Democrats wisely passed the 2008 financial rescue bill, but it cost them politically.
Addressing the economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent passage of the troubled asset relief program, TARP, Brian Baird told a Hill, had we wanted to, we could have let the president, President Bush, we could have let him stew in his own juices.
But Baird insisted Democrats did the right thing passing TARP, which was signed by Bush in the fall of 2008.
Most Democrats in Congress backed it while it faced more resistance from the Republicans.
Yeah, we could have said the economy is going to collapse.
The world's going to go into a depression.
You're going to get to blame.
And your party is going to get to blame because you're in power.
And we're going to ride this into the majority for the next 40 years.
That's what we could have done.
Instead, we waited until Obama was president to do it.
I mean, they're not trying to take credit for their seriousness and their patriotism.
Hey, you know, we could have let the country go south and get, haven't you guys been blaming Bush for the past two years, Mr. Baird?
Congressman Beard?
And get this.
In the New York Times, this is the system Saturday.
So I guess not even the New York Times wanted this piece read.
They gave an op-ed space to Christina Romer, one of the former Council of Economic Advisors head honchos in the regime.
And she says it's the big questions that slow growth.
She's now an econ professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was the chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors.
She writes, uncertainty is frequently blamed for the sorry state of the economy, for why businesses are not investing strongly in new equipment or hiring more workers, and for why consumers are not spending freely.
On Wall Street, it's even said that government meddling is the main culprit and that political gridlock is the cure.
Gee, who else says that?
It has been I.L. Rushbox saying gridlock can be the best thing that could happen to us.
We're already starting to see vestiges of gridlock.
And government meddling is the main culprit.
Government meddling equals crony capitalism.
And I don't care if it's Republican cronies or Democrat cronies.
Crony capitalism is nothing about issues.
It's nothing about what's best for the country.
And it's what dominates relationships between Wall Street and Washington.
Just does.
Shouldn't be that way, but it is.
Well, she says that that's a misreading of the situation.
Uncertainty is likely holding back the recovery, but its sources are far more fundamental than the tax and environmental issues that typically top the list of complaints.
The solution is certainly not for the government to do less.
Rather, government needs to do much more.
Despite all the hand-wringing over the future of the Bush tax cuts, it is just not plausible that they are a major source of uncertainty.
At a meeting on Tuesday with congressional leaders, Obama indicated, as he had done frequently before, he was eager to reach a compromise.
Yeah, he indicates it, but he never does it.
So, tax cuts are not a major source of uncertainty.
And this was a head honcho of the Council of Economic Advisors.
Then she writes, in a paper I wrote many years ago, I found that such macroeconomic uncertainty helped start the Great Depression.
Stock market crash in October 29 didn't destroy a particularly large amount of wealth or make people highly pessimistic.
Rather, it made companies and consumers very unsure about future income.
So led them to stop spending as they waited for more information.
Hello?
Duh.
So she says, how do we resolve uncertainty about future growth?
The Fed, Congress, and the president need to reaffirm that they will do whatever it takes to restore the economy to full health.
They could take a lesson from FDR, who declared in his 1933 inaugural address he would treat the task of putting people back to work as we treat the emergency of a war, but he didn't.
What I find laughable about this, this quote, the Federal Reserve Congress, the president, need to reaffirm that they will do whatever it takes to restore the economy to full health.
Hasn't that been what Obama has been affirming for two years?
And the Democrats in Congress have not been affirming that for two years?
She's joking, right?
No, sadly, she's not.
This woman totally screwed up her job, now goes to the New York Times to tell us how to fix her mess and still gets it wrong.
I think I deserve a medal for courageous restraint for waiting until a third hour in a program to talk about the National Football League.
Normally, I would have led off of the first hour when I've been flooded with emails from the stick to the issues crowd.
At any rate, you know, one of my all-time favorite universities is Hillsdale.
Hillsdale College.
And to give you just an example, talk about Imprimus, their monthly digest.
And a lot of people say, well, big deal, Rush, a conservative speech.
I mean, I listen to you every day, get conservatives.
I understand that.
But Imprimus is a monthly digest or compendium of some of the most brilliant conservatism uttered.
The most recent edition features the words of Mike Pence, the Republican representative from Indiana.
Now, Imprimus is read now by nearly 2 million people a month, contains a highly relevant speech made by a conservative of real influence, and Pence is one of those, number three ranking Republican in the House.
He recently resigned from some responsibilities after helping in the midterm elections, and some people speculate that he is considering a bigger future in politics, i.e., seeking higher orifice.
And in the midst of all that, Imprimus prints his most recent thoughts on the presidency and the Constitution.
Did you see his speech?
Did you hear it?
You didn't?
Well, that's what Imprimus is for.
And it's free.
Hillsdale College makes Imprimus free for you.
It makes a great Christmas gift, not because it's free, but because it's valuable read and a publication people look forward to getting.
Go to rushforhillsdale.com and register your family and friends to receive Imprimus every month.
And then print out the gift certificate telling your recipients that Imprimus is on its way to them each month.
You can give it away as many people as you want.
Zilch Zero Nada Charge.
Can do all of this today at rush4hillsdale.com to Houston.
Dimitri, welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
Hello.
Thank you, Russ.
Good afternoon.
It's an honor speaking with you.
Thank you very much.
I was listening to that speech that Obama made and the one that you play earlier.
And two things I was kind of irritated about.
I'm the guy that he mentioned in that speech, the guy that came here and that left the country.
And the guy that had the guts and came here to try my very best.
So you are a go-getter.
I am the one.
I came here.
The rest of them are still there.
And the only thing I'm faced with here, and I'll use the example that he's using with the car that was in a ditch.
The harder I try to earn at this $250,000, I'm sitting in this car, and the faster I drive, there are more toll boots ahead of me.
And the faster I accelerate, the more toll boots are ahead of me.
But my bank account has only limited resources.
I understand that.
That's a good analogy.
And furthermore, the harder I press, the more I pollute.
The more carbon taxes, the more carbon footprint I leave behind.
And he wants us to bring America, to transform the country.
Right, so the more progress you make, the more destruction you leave in your path.
Exactly.
And at the same time, we're shutting down the drilling in the Gulf.
So we have to go buy the oil from the Saudis.
And the more we produce and the more we try to bring America back to the manufacturing and to the real capitalism that America was known about and the America that saved and won war after war and saved world and saved nations and saved Europe and gives billions of dollars to Africa.
The harder we try, the more we'll be blamed for doing so.
Yeah, I mean, these are perfect analogies.
Where are you from, Dimitri?
I was born in a country name, Bulgaria.
It's a small country between.
And another funny thing is, maybe we should give the Nobel Peace Prize to Castro instead of Gore, because the guy managed for 50 years to keep this country unindustrialized, did not kill any whales, did not spill any oil.
They don't have any cows that bulge and regurgitate and increase the CO2 level, and no meat consumption, no footprint, no melting icebergs.
In Cuba, the ideal place.
And he has a lot of similarity.
With the best healthcare system in the world, where doctors are fleeing the country, by the way.
And free rice cookers.
Free rice cookers for some.
Yes.
And, by the way, 500,000 layoffs of government workers now.
Correct.
That just means less pollution and less destruction.
Less blame.
We have nothing to blame Castro for.
So I guess what you're telling me is there's not a whole lot of goal in being a go-getter.
Yes, it's a process where the higher you fly, the colder you get.
And more and more and more tolls will be introduced.
And he forgets to mention the following.
It's not that the people are $250,000 earners.
Their businesses are.
He does not distinguish the people that provide and work in a dry cleaner's business or in a plumbing business or in whatever small mom and pop shop.
The business is rich, not the mom and pop.
I'm in Pub doesn't buy a Ferrari in London.
This guy could not be more correct.
Thank you, Dimitri.
Great to have you on the program.
Back to the phones, Rigo.
Cameron is in Hartford, Connecticut.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hi.
It is indeed an honor to talk with you on the people's airwaves.
Thank you for the people's airwaves.
Well, you're going to see that rush in the topic of what I called about.
But let me first mention that when you say, where are you from, Dimitri, it echoes one of your mentors in a way that is heartwarming to me?
Your emphasis on from is right out of the book of the guy who started it all, you know?
Where are you from, Dimitri?
I don't know if you recall back in New York.
Ah, okay.
I got it.
You know about Bob Grant.
Bob Grant, I guess, one of the fathers of what you do.
But I called about the effect.
And one of the mothers.
And one of the mothers.
Right.
Precisely.
We're going to miss the golden EIB microphone, and I often meant to ask you if that microphone is named after someone as the golden EIB microphone, or if that's the composition of it.
No, but the composition, not named after anybody.
It's actually gold-plated here.
I had to ask.
Yep.
But I called about the loss of the EIB microphone through the enactment of what was given in a speech by the FCC chairman at the Columbia University School of Journalism.
You're talking about Michael Kopp.
I'm talking about the end of talk radio, and I'm talking about Michael Copps.
You're very right, as you always are, 99, whatever.
And we're going to be lost without you, Rush.
And we're going to wish we had the Ferris Doctrine.
Is it called the Ferris Doctrine?
It was called the Fairness Doctrine.
Oh.
Well, now we're going to wish we had that because if the Fairness Doctrine were brought back, we would have equal time with the propaganda from the secular progressive left.
Well, that's, I don't want to get to the technical here, but people often confuse the fairness doctrine with equal time, and they're not the same thing.
They try to be, people try to implement the fairness doctrine under that premise, but it's really not equal time.
At any rate, what is your fear?
Well, my fear is my fear is something that happened Thursday night, and he laid down a game plan which will be followed, which will require each radio station to be scrutinized with what is called a public value test.
If a station passes the public value test, it, of course, keeps the license it has earned to use the people's airwaves.
Right.
If not, it goes on probation for a year.
I saw him say this.
I'm familiar with his remarks.
Well, it gets better because the news item that reported it Friday morning goes on to list the seven secrets about what it will take to stay on the airwaves, and you pass none of them.
And the one that is tucked perfectly in the middle of seven.
You can imagine item number four is neither in the top three nor the bottom three.
In the true wisdom of the secular progressive left, item four is called reflecting diversity.
And this exposes the people with the short cropped hair who are behind this.
And it reads, Cops noted that people of color own only about 3.6% of full-powered commercial television stations.
But he also said that diversity encompasses how groups are depicted in the media, too often stereotyped in character caricatured, et cetera, et cetera.
The FCC's Diversity Advisory Council has spent years providing us with specific targeted recommendations to correct this injustice.
Yes.
Cops said how sad it is that most of these recommendations have not been put to a commission vote.
It is time to right this awful wrong.
And that's the end of it all, Rush, because he'll take away the internet through the WikiLeaks excuse.
And now he takes away the talk radio, and now you have to meet me in the street, and I don't think I'm going to see you there.
Yeah, you're right about that.
Well, I'm right about most things.
That's why I try to stay tuned to this station.
Well, I'm aware of what he said.
It's been a wet dream of theirs for who knows how long to be able to have these kinds of regulations, limitations, and so forth.
But if they do that, and if they ever do succeed in this massive restriction of commercial broadcasting, there are other places to go that are not regulated and that they don't have their myths into yet.
Regardless, it's just like the fairness doctrine.
I know what these guys have in mind.
I know what their game plan is.
I know how they're going to go about it.
Basically use intimidation, license renewal, fines, all this kind of thing.
But for some reason now, maybe just my eternal optimism, I'm really, unlike you, I have not written myself off yet.
I've not, I don't mean that personally, I've not written off the industry.
I don't think these guys are going to totally succeed.
People won't put up with it.
People will simply not put up with it.
Well, there was a wet dream called control of our lives through the Obamacare.
That's OBAMA Obama, like Alabama, A-L-A-B-A-M-A is Alabama.
Right.
So Barack Obama has his health care, and that was a wet dream that came true.
And now they have the financial reform bill, which has further put the nail in the coffin.
And those two things enough are enough to kill the airways, not the airways, but to kill the country.
So we've lost the country, and we won't be able to talk to each other as we go down in flames.
Yeah, but we haven't yet.
We're going to repeal health care, or we're going to go down trying.
There is a concerted effort taken to do this.
I really, I appreciate your concern out there.
I really do.
But I don't want you to panic.
I've always said I'll tell you when it's time to panic.
And it isn't yet.
If they ever made an official move on that basis, it would be seen by everybody for what it is.
And the whole intellectual notion of diversity can be swatted away like a mosquito, like a fly.
The fact is that there are more points of view.
There are more opportunities.
There are more.
When I started this program, there were, what was it, 125 talk radio stations, 125 in the country.
And today there are numbers hit 2,500?
I mean, it's huge.
And you've got everything from Chinese opera to favorite carrot cake recipes during the holidays, programming.
You've got, it's all out there, and nobody is denied.
Nobody, now ownership, that's a whole different thing.
And if they want to try to legislate that, then we're not really even talking about ownership.
We're talking about subsidy, which even now takes place.
But this stuff does not happen in a vacuum, and the victims of this kind of thing are not just going to sit around and let it happen.
They're just not, oh, okay, Mr. Copp said we're going to do it.
Okay, fine.
Well, you know what?
Fine.
I've been talking about going to Singapore or New Zealand.
I guess that just isn't going to be the way to go down.
And I appreciate your concern.
I really do.
You're sounding a nice alarm bell for people who are not aware of what Copp had to say.
But whatever.
These guys have two years, and the Republicans win in 2012.
But whatever they do can be reversed just as easily as these guys can do whatever they want to do.
And believe me, it would be if it were to ever happen.
Cameron in Hartford, thanks very much for the phone call.
I appreciate it.
And we're back.
I am Rush Limbaugh serving humanity with half my brain tied behind my back.
Just to make it fair, Friday afternoon to Washington, on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats held a press conference.
Talk about the extension of the Bush tax rates.
The subject won't go away.
It's dividing the Democrat Party.
Here's Claire McCaskill from Missouri.
Now it should be.
That's my home state.
Should be pointed out that Claire McCaskill is worth.
I saw this earlier.
It's 13 million, 19 million something.
She's.
She's in the top 10 wealthiest people in the in the in the Senate, I believe she ranks up there.
Here is a portion of what she had to say.
They need to pull back the curtain and realize that you've got a Republican Party that's not worried about the people in the TEA Party.
They're worried about people that can't decide which home to go to over the Christmas holidays.
All right.
Now two things about this.
She may be right in one sense, and that is certain elements of the Republican Party may not be all that happy with the TEA Party, but they're worried about people that can't decide which home to go to over the Christmas holidays.
Have you ever had more than one house snurdle?
Have you ever had more than one home?
I mean to live in Dawn.
Have you ever had more than one home?
You ever, you ever had more than one home to live in, I mean in different locations.
You might own two in the same street because you're trying to sell one, but if you had two homes in different towns you haven't then you don't know how hard it is to decide which one to go to.
it can be a true I mean it could be a tough decision there's a whole lot of variables involved here she doesn't know what she's talking about Republicans don't care about that I'm that she's misreading that but she's got a bunch of homes I'll guarantee you spends I'll bet she spends a lot of time figuring out where she's going to be and which one she's going to be in at what time
well at price of jet fuel does it's a factor look at John Kerry has seven of them John Kerry's got a home outside Pittsburgh he's got a home in Boston he's got a home in Washington he's got a home out there in in Sun Valley Idaho There's so many variables.
Like, half the time, he probably does not want to be where his wife is going to be.
I mean, they probably have kitchen table discussions, dining room table.
Where are we going to spend next weekend?
It can take them, I don't know, maybe an hour to figure it out.
And they're Democrats.
The more choices you have, the more time it takes you to make them.
Who's she to start making fun of this?
The Republicans are more concerned about people have which home they're going to spend the holidays in.
She's talking about herself.
I'll lay you 10 to 1, it's a big problem in her house.
That's why it's even on her mind.
I know these people left and right.
Face the nation, John Kyle on with Bob Schieffer talking about tax cuts.
Schieffer said, Senator Kyle, is the Senate going to get down to business and resolve this?
I hope so.
We can.
We should.
I would just make one point.
Nobody's talking about tax cuts.
We're talking about extending the rates that have been in existence for the last decade.
So just to be sure.
But what about you, Senator Kyle?
Is temporary good enough on those upper income extensions?
Extensions.
Yeah, we're not talking about tax cuts.
I got you.
We're talking about extending for another period of time the rates that have been in existence for the last decade.
You still gotcha.
Those tax rates helped our economy and job production.
They did not create the problem that we have today.
That was a problem created, as you know, by the crash of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing market, the so-called bubble.
It had nothing to do with these tax rates.
Exactly right, but it doesn't matter.
That's not what Schieffer's point was.
He's sitting there.
Don't want to talk about that.
Anyway, Claire McCaskill, $19.42 million net worth in 2008.
Claire McCaskill.
And let me, do not illegal aliens have two homes.
Illegal aliens have, they got a home here, they got a home wherever they came from.
And they aren't exactly rich.
And they try to figure out which home they're going to...
Shouldn't we want people to have two homes?
What with the housing crisis we've got today?
All right, we're back, my friends.
But sadly, we're out of time.
No more busy broadcast moments remain or very few.
But it's a rollicking kickoff to a rollicking full week of broadcast excellence.
We'll be back here in 21 hours to do it all over again.
And yeah, look at, I'm not trying to make enemies here by any stretch of the imagination, but picking straight up, you got to go with the Patriots.
You have to go with Tom Brady at home against the Jets.