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March 15, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
March 15, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
John Conyers said it.
We've got it on tape.
Obamacare is simply a platform for creating a single-payer system.
Yep, said it in the National Press Club.
We got Dingle on tape saying the same thing.
The thing is, our guys on the Republican side know this too, but they don't seem to be hell-bent on stopping it.
Where's Obama?
Where is Obama?
I'm still amazed at how utterly out of it Obama is.
Where is he?
Has he checked out?
Is he sick?
Are his handlers busy in other parts of the world?
Mrs. Clinton has met with Libyan rebel leaders in Paris.
Now it's safe to do that, I figure, now that the revolution against Gaddafi is safely lost, Gaddafi is probably going to win this or has one.
So now it's safe to go meet with the rebel leaders, probably trying to arrange a place for him to live.
Paris, Miami, L.A., L.A. looks a lot like Libya, certain parts of it.
I've been there.
I haven't seen it.
You got that going on.
I mean, it's baffling.
His handlers are busy in other parts of the world and unable to give him direction.
What's going on?
He's acting like a child.
The big news about Obama today is that he is going to tape his NCAA bracket picks today to be aired on ESPN tomorrow.
I mean, that's the news, and that's from our good buddy Jacob Tapper.
At ABC News, the world anxiously awaits President Obama's revelation of his NCAA basketball brackets.
The important work of being president will be broadcast tomorrow.
Did you know the stock market was down $250 this morning?
It's $173 right now.
Stock market was down $250.
Unemployment, I think that's a little bit of an issue for millions of Americans.
Some people say the deficit is not $14 trillion, that it's much higher than that.
Have you noticed that gasoline prices are creeping up towards $4 a gallon?
In fact, in Obama's home state of Hawaii, they have now gone past $4 a gallon.
You know, this is the time of year, though, folks.
We've learned this from observation.
This time of year when the president really starts to focus.
This is when Obama calls on past experience and reads everything written on the subject.
This is the culmination of endless hours of watching, reading, and thinking about college basketball, the brackets.
He's going to videotape his picks for broadcast on ESPN.
It was last year.
On March 17th, the president took time to appear on ESPN to fill out his brackets, explain his picks, and really demonstrate how preparation pays off.
That was last year.
In the meantime, Marco Rubio has had it, and it hasn't taken long for Marco Rubio to have had it.
Marco Rubio says, what is this continuing resolution?
Crap.
I didn't come in here to fund the government every two to three weeks and cut $6 billion here, $6 billion there.
What the hell is going on here?
I wish the guy would run for president.
Marco Rubio, let's look here at the nuclear stack just to give you an idea where we're headed here.
From the French news agency, U.S. ill-prepared for emergency radiation, according to a study.
From San Francisco Reuters, Peter Henderson.
Special report, big California quake likely to devastate state.
California will experience unthinkable damage when the next powerful quake strikes, probably within, wait for it, 30 years.
Even though California prides itself on being on the leading edge of earthquake science.
Well, that's good.
They had me worried there for a minute.
But if a quake might not happen for another 30 years, we're all going to be dead from global warming anyway.
Oh, and guess what?
Diane Sawyer, ABC News in Japan reports that in the midst of all of this, the meltdowns, the radiation, the earthquakes, a new one near Mount Fuji just a couple of hours ago, 5.8 to 6 on the Andy Richter scale.
Well, that's close to Tokyo.
Another earthquake.
And Diane Sawyer has a report on how the Japanese, despite this, are still heavily engaged in saving the planet by recycling their waste.
No, no, no, no, no.
I kid you not.
I've got the audio sound, but no, no.
No, I wouldn't dare joke with you about something as important as this.
Diane Sawyer has it.
They are recycling out there.
Here, they're recycling their own refuse.
Let's see if I can find it here.
I've got 27 soundbites.
Let me see.
I did not mark it for early use.
And now I got to go through 14 pages.
It's number nine.
The broadcast engineer found it.
Here it is.
Diane Sawyer.
This is a shelter.
Some of these people here for days.
And look, it's recycling.
Organized for recycling.
Plastic, combustible barnable, canes.
They're recycling.
I mean, give them a gold star over there.
Diane Sawyer reports we can all, ladies and gentlemen, rest easy that in the midst of this meltdown disaster, the Japanese are still doing their part to save the planet.
Well, I do too.
I feel a little guilty.
I gave up recycling a long time ago.
It's bogus.
I gave it up.
I don't reach.
Oh, they come to my house every day for one reason or another.
There may be people recycling, making up for the fact that I'm not at my house, but I don't care.
I see a trash can, and if it's got room, bamo.
I throw whatever is trash into it.
But that's why I'm feeling guilty now that the Japanese, in the midst of all this, are still engaged in their recycling.
So the U.S. is ill-prepared for an emergency radiation.
Big California quake likely to devastate the state.
Germany has announced they're going to shut down seven nuclear reactors.
This is how panic.
This is liberalism.
This is how liberalism spreads.
Germany's leaders think their people are all concerned, so they've got to shut down seven nuclear reactors because of the earthquake in Japan.
That equals leaders being prepared.
It has nothing to do with whether or not it's going to happen.
It has nothing to do with whether it's going to be an earthquake.
It's just, okay, there's a nuclear meltdown going on over in Japan.
We're going to shut down our reactors.
This shows leadership.
This shows concern.
Felix Felix Salmone.
I prefer to pronounce it that way.
It could be Salmon.
I don't know how he pronounces his name.
S-A-L-M-O-N.
In the analysis and opinion sector of Reuters says, don't donate money to Japan.
They're a rich country.
They can print money.
We are letting the poor and the hungry and the thirsty in the third world starve by sending money to Japan.
I kid you not, it's right here, right here.
Have it formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
We got real devastation out there, and we are hobbling earmarking funds for Japan is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places.
There's all kinds of hunger, there's starvation, disease, and conflict in the third world.
And every dollar donated to Japan leaves the hunger, the starvation, the disease, and the conflict untouched in the third world.
That would be Felix Salmone of Reuters.
And have you ever heard snurdly model Orit Fox?
Well, I haven't either, but there's some supermodel out there by the name of Orit Fox.
And there's a story here in the New York Daily News.
This is really a shocking story.
She's had breast implants.
She's very busty out there.
And she did a photo shoot the other day.
I think this was in Spain.
They did a photo shoot, and she was posing with a BOA constrictor, a snake.
And she decided to sex up the photo shoot and started licking the snake.
The snake bit her left breast.
She panicked.
Handlers had to come in and pull the snake off.
The snake died of silicone poisoning.
And we will be back.
Don't go away.
Well, yeah, the moral of that story is don't bite breasts with silicon implants.
Snakes dead.
It's a true story.
There's even a picture of the moment of truth that ran in the New York Daily News.
Only touch, folks.
There's a video online.
Okay, only touch.
Do not bite.
That's your EIB lesson for today.
Great to have you.
El Rushbow at 800-282-2882 and the email address El Rushbow at EIBnet.com.
All right, here it is.
Representative John Conyers, Democrat Mission ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told the CyberCast News Service, I guess it's yesterday, that the health care law that President Obama signed last March is a platform for building a single-payer health care system in the United States.
Now, I know that none of you are surprised by this.
Obama himself has said so.
We have played for you the audio zone budgets of Obama saying this as far back as 2002 on various speeches that he made before his union buddies public radio station in Chicago.
Conyers yesterday spoke during a newsmakers program at the National Press Club.
He said that after discussing the issue with Representative Dennis Kucinich, he voted for the health care law because he saw it as a necessary platform for building toward a single-payer healthcare system in the United States.
Well, we're all reminded of John Dingell.
We go back to May 23rd, sorry, March 23rd of 2010, almost just shy of a week here, one year ago, on our Detroit affiliate, WJR, on the Paul W. Smith show.
He was talking to Dingell, and Paul W. Smith said, are we ready to let 72,000 more people die in our country if 18,000 died, whatever the number is that figure anyone comes up with per year because of a lack of health insurance or health care when this bill doesn't take effect until 2014?
When Paul W. Smith was saying, look, we got all these emergencies.
People are dying.
It's anywhere from $72,000 a year to $14,000 a year, and yet your bill doesn't implement till 2014.
What gives?
Paul W. We're not ready to be doing it.
But let me remind you, this has been going on for years.
We are bringing it to a halt.
The harsh fact of the matter is when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.
To control the people.
That's John Dingell.
About a year ago, he meant 300 million Americans.
Now, to be fair, Dingell called and said he misspoke.
But we have kept this soundbite at the ready because we knew, I knew that we were going to be using it and reminding everybody about it.
Lo and behold, John Conyers yesterday at the National Press Club.
Had that bill, with all its flaws, failed, it would have taken us another decade or longer to get single payer up and going.
We view the health care reform bill as a platform on which we are now able to move forward.
There was a CyberCast news service reporter asked a question.
Do you see a single-payer health care system ultimately in the United States?
Of course.
Well, every industrial country on the planet already has a universal system of health care.
If we didn't have this, then health care, universal health care, would be an even more difficult legislative objective.
But here we have, ladies and gentlemen, there's no question what this has always been about.
Universal single-payer health care.
Everything in this bill, all these waivers, for example, all these waivers are simply designed to delay the implementation.
People finally figure out what has happened.
It'll be too late.
Obama will be re-elected or gone, either way, not standing for election again.
So the left has made no secret of the fact that their objective here is not to let you keep the plan that you've got, not to let you keep the doctor that you've got.
No, no, no, no.
It's never been about that.
Obama, if we had to, we could revive the sound bites.
We don't have to.
You've heard them on this program from 2002 to the 2008 campaign, talking to various audiences.
The whole point here is single-payer, but we can't do it overnight.
Might take 10 to 15 years, but that's the objective.
So here's Dingell who said that you've got to do that to control the people.
And here's Conyers.
Well, of course we're going to have it.
We're the only industrialized country that does it.
Of course, that's the objective here.
Now, while all that is the stated objective of the left, it's no longer arguable.
It's not something that it's debatable.
While this is going on, there's a chance to totally defund it.
And the Republican leadership in Washington just doesn't seem interested because they are more afraid of a government shutdown as the result of it.
This ongoing continuing resolution business, it's a ploy by Harry Reid to avoid having a budget.
This is going to allow Boehner to stand by his notion he's not going to break the rules.
If he had a budget, this was part of a budget deal.
They could defund it, vote on it.
Boehner doesn't want to do that because it's part of the continuing resolution.
This is about the $105 billion Pelosi snuck in the bill that our implementation costs every year.
There's a chance to wipe it out.
It's what the election was about in November.
And yet, it seems like fear over shutting down the government and the aftermath of that is a far greater concern to the Republicans in Washington than actually getting rid of this monstrosity.
AP has a story.
Conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill began yesterday to come out against the continuing resolution to keep the government running for three more weeks while the White House and Republican lawmakers seek a longer-term agreement on spending cuts.
Jim Jordan, Representative Ohio Republican, chairs the Republican Study Committee, which makes up a sizable majority of House Republicans, said that the measure should include a ban on federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
Congress needs to do better than cutting spending a few billion dollars at a time.
Over in the Senate, Marco Rubio announced his opposition to the upcoming measure, saying Washington politicians of both parties are scrambling to put together a two- and three-week plan to keep funding the government while not fundamentally changing the behavior that's gotten us into this mess to begin with, and he doesn't want any part of it.
Here's a little bit, Audio Subite 17, of what he had to say yesterday.
Why didn't Senator Reed and then Speaker Pelosi and the president get together and pass a budget when they were in charge here with no opposition a year ago?
And that's the reason why we're facing a shutdown.
And more importantly, America's facing the ultimate shutdown, and that is the day when this country cannot continue to borrow money to fund its operations.
That's facing us right in the face, and no one wants to deal with it.
Amen.
He does.
It's why he went to Washington.
Alan West, another from Florida, who's on this.
Rubio went on to say, what, I don't want to be part of this.
This is not why I came to Washington to do this piecemeal, $6 billion a time here.
Everybody's afraid of a government shutdown on our side.
If that's what's necessary to fix this, then so be it.
Mike Pence, Fox Business Network, Lou Dobbs tonight last night had a discussion about the budget, and Dobbs said, you've said the time to pick a fight maybe now.
Is this the issue?
This three-week extension of the continuing resolution?
Harry Reid took to the floor to defend the, what was it, the Cowboy Poetry Institutes.
It just convinced me, look, it's time to pick a fight.
If we're ever going to fundamentally change the fiscal direction of our national government, it's important that this new Republican majority draw a line in the sand, say this far and no farther.
I'm like you.
I look at it, and it doesn't seem that that line is being drawn for a host of reasons.
My younger brother, David, a nationally known, renowned columnist, has, in fact, written about this in his latest column.
And I'll share with you some excerpts from it.
It's right on point when we get back.
Right after this.
Rushlin bought half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair, serving humanity simply by showing up.
Have you noticed that food prices are higher?
Washington Post has a story today.
Speaking of gasoline prices, too, I guess it's the same way of thinking.
Washington Post says that higher food prices are the new normal now.
It's just the way the economics of everything is worked out here.
Nobody, of course, is to blame for this, Nor is anybody to blame for rising gas prices.
Unless you want to make a case for policies implemented by George W. Bush that still reverberate today.
But food prices, gasoline prices, the new norm now, and nobody, of course, is to blame.
The president, of course, AWOL, nobody knows where he is other than taping his NCAA basketball bracket picks.
for airing on ESPN tomorrow.
I got a couple notes.
I checked the email during the break.
How does he do?
I don't know, folks.
I didn't go to college, so I don't have the old rah-rah college spirit when it comes to college football or basketball.
I don't really get into it.
I don't know how his picks work out.
I have no clue.
My memory tells me that he botched it horribly last year.
But I don't really know, and I have not taken the time to look it up.
My brother David column, GOP fear that history repeats itself ensures that it will starts out here with a good question.
Why is it that despite the Republicans' resounding electoral victory in 2010 based on their promises for real change, why is it many of us have this queasy feeling they're not quite measuring up to the task, even in this climate of Democrat infighting and Obama's weaknesses?
TheHill.com reports that there's a developing dissension between Obama and the Senate Democrats, whose respective political fortunes are moving in opposite directions, complicating their efforts to win a titanic battle against Republicans over federal spending.
That's a quote from The Hill.
Obama's trying to stay above the fray and let the Democrat legislators twist in the wind of conflict with Republican congressmen over a possible government shutdown.
What Obama's plan is, and this is right on the money, by the way, is to ride in just in time to take credit for the ultimate resolution and be seen as a bipartisan problem solver.
But he's not going to be involved in it.
Whatever happens, happens, and he's going to take the credit for it as having been the guiding influence and force.
While he seriously is out videotaping his NCAA basketball picks, you know, really terrific golf weather headed toward the nation's capital, 60s and 70s, Wednesday through Saturday.
I looked.
The president has the rest of the week planned out.
Why not go play golf every day?
There's nothing to be done in Libya.
President's already said what's happening there is unacceptable, and that's that.
What this president does is say stuff.
When he says stuff, that's it.
He's already said we need to live with our means.
Okay, that problem solved.
He's already said he feels terrible about the events in Japan.
It's about as much as any human being can do.
He's already said schools and bullies don't mix.
He sent his wife out there to pound home that message.
That's done.
He called for gender equality in the home and in the workplace.
Okay, that problem's been solved.
And he said that oil production at golf is booming because of him.
His moratorium has led to increased production.
He got that done.
What else is there to do but go play golf?
Well, he has said he won't rest until there are jobs for all Americans who seek work, but apparently every American who wants a job has one.
Otherwise, Obama would be focusing like a laser.
So that problem's been solved.
So after this arduous task of picking the brackets for the NCAA tournament and then videotaping the presentation for ESPN, what is there left to do?
Guy's overworked as it is.
He hadn't had a vacation a couple months.
Why not just go play golf every day?
He's commented on everything, press conferences here and there.
The only problem is that when he talks, nobody listens.
Beyond that, leaders don't comment, they take action.
But he's not taking any action.
He's sitting around biding his time.
In his case, taking action means playing golf.
So that's well, you know what?
All right, all right, all right.
You have a point.
I stand corrected.
He has been out fundraising.
You're right.
That's hard work, too.
So I'll stand chagrined.
Thanks for correcting me on that.
So my brother's right here.
He's trying to stay above the fray.
He's let the Democrats and the Congress twist in the wind over this possible government shutdown.
And whatever happens, he's going to run in there, take credit.
President is going to Rio de Janeiro for the weekend.
He is.
Marty Graw was last week.
He's going to Rio.
He's going there this weekend.
Well, I don't know.
He might have seen that picture of Giselle Bunchon looking dreamily at Tom Brady and figured, man, if that's the talent down there, look at all I can eat.
Who knows?
But he's going to Rio.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, many Senate Democrats who are thought to be vulnerable in 2012 have defected from their own party's proposal to cut spending.
But hardly any Democrats, including the defectors, can be regarded as serious in their approach to the debt crisis now plaguing the country.
Yet, and here's the point that my brother makes: are congressional Republicans capitalizing on this Democrat disunity and incompetence?
Are they capitalizing on the president having checked out?
There are positive signs.
Paul Ryan, diligent efforts to help craft a comprehensive plan to reduce discretionary spending.
And Ryan's not alone.
There are other conservative representatives and senators are standing strong.
But when we shift our gaze to the Republican leadership in the Senate and the House, and even to some of the House freshmen for whom we've had high expectations, there might be a little cause for concern there.
The first real confrontation with Obama, whose party had been trounced the month before, came last December.
It resulted in a compromise that I think casual observers think the Democrats won, even though the Bush tax cuts were extended.
The Democrats lost their shirts and they still set the premise for the lame duck section.
Next came the House Republicans' disappointing failure to make much headway in defunding Obamacare, which it blamed on insurmountable legislative rules.
This rule meaning, well, continuing resolution, you can't do any legislation in there.
You can only attack discretionary spending.
That $105 billion is not discretionary spending, so we can't attack this.
We need to be doing a budget to do that.
And Reed doesn't want to do a budget, so we're kind of handcuffed.
So they're hiding behind the fact that, well, we got the rules, so we can't break the rules.
And then they scramble to avert a government shutdown and acceded to this continuing resolution until March 4th.
Then another one through March 18th, tomorrow, which contained cuts, but also allowed the Democrats to kick the ball down the road another month or so.
Vice President Bite Me, who was to be instrumental in negotiating with Republicans, used this extension to head off on an international trip without even a superficial nod at resolving these spending issues.
Now, through all of this, you get the idea that it's the Democrats, not Republicans, who have the upper hand in these negotiations, and they lost.
And it's got everybody puzzled here.
What was November about?
Where are the Scott Walkers of Washington?
Where are they?
Now, House Republicans did pass a bill containing $61 billion in spending cuts, but most conservatives and Tea Party activists think it's not enough.
The Virginia Tea Partyers are particularly displeased with Eric Cantor and a story about this yesterday.
Cantor opposed an amendment for even deeper cuts.
It was 5.5% across the board for non-security discretionary spending.
So we're coming up on another deadline.
Congressional Republicans are presenting yet another continuing resolution, which contains another $6 billion in spending cuts, but doesn't include the so-called policy writers that would address important issues like defunding Obamacare Planned Parenthood.
And that's why Marco Rubio is speaking.
What am I here for?
I didn't come here to be part of this piecemeal stuff.
$6 billion here, $6 billion.
That's not why we're looking at $14 trillion national debt, and we're at $6 billion in a continuing resolution.
The irony here is that it's this fear of a government shutdown, apparently, that's got the Republican leadership paralyzed.
And they might be ensuring that history repeats itself precisely because they're behaving as if they fear it will.
They think a government shutdown will cream them like it did in 1995, but it didn't cream them.
They won re-election in 1996.
They got welfare reform, but they lost the headline battle.
They lost the news media battle.
The budget shutdown of 1995 was portrayed as a huge PR triumph for Clinton over Newt Gingrich, pinning the government shutdown on congressional Republicans who don't care about people.
And they don't want that said about them again.
And they're afraid anything they do that causes a government shutdown to the same old, same old.
They don't care about people.
They're content to let the little people starve or not get their turkeys at Thanksgiving or whatever it is.
And I think this is a total miscalculation of the public mood.
This isn't the 90s.
We have a nation-threatening debt crisis.
And the Republican primary opponent is a weak president who's doing more to exacerbate our problems than he has to solve them.
What my brother is saying here is that we've never had a greater opportunity to contrast who we are and what we believe.
I mean, I've got a story here, folks.
It's a what is it, ABC poll, some poll out there about the decline of America.
It's a political story.
GOP sounds alarm over American decline.
ABC Washington Post has a poll.
32% think the country is doing right.
The mood of this country is what the hell's going on?
More and more people think that we have an administration that's actively, happily presiding over the decline of this country.
A decline a majority of the people in this country don't want.
And there doesn't seem to be any noticeable effort to stop this way of thinking or believing in Washington.
So one unfortunate constant seems to be the Republicans' incapacity to handle their electoral prosperity.
You know, Obama, that first joint legislative meeting he had after he won, the Republicans up there, Boehner and some of these guys suggested tax cuts.
Hey, nice idea, but I won.
Well, so did the Republicans in November.
They won, but there's this, man, it's big too, this fear of a government shutdown.
And it's causing them to negotiate as though they don't have the upper hand.
It's patently obvious.
Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, has shown the way.
He has shown that it can be done, even in Wisconsin.
And if the Republicans aren't careful, they're going to let their fear of bad PR kill the Tea Party revolution.
And if they're not careful, what's going to happen here is a third party is going to happen because the Tea Party crowd grassroots who made the Republican leadership possible, make no mistake, it's the Tea Party turned out and voted that made the Republican leaders win, enabled their victory, made their leadership possible.
If they're not satisfied with the direction they see, it's third party time and nobody's going to be able to talk them out of it.
And then we fracture our movement.
I don't know, Snerdley, if they would even listen to me on not forming a third party.
All right, this is serious stuff.
It really is.
Look, I'm a little long.
I've got to take a break here.
Sit tight.
We will be back and continue after this.
Okay, back to the phones we go, or at two of the phones we go.
Let's Marietta, Pennsylvania.
Start with John.
Welcome, sir.
Nice to have you with us on the EIB network.
Good afternoon.
I'm a senior reactor operator licensed on a facility in the United States.
It's very similar to the ones that are having the issues in Japan.
Yes, sir.
And I wanted to bring up a point that the liberal media would never talk about.
They probably don't even know it.
But General Electric designed these plants.
General Electric manufactured the reactors for some of them.
American companies were the architectural firms.
And the mistake here was made by the Japanese because General Electric designs a plant and they say, here are the specifications of this plant.
Then they bring it to the potential buyer, in this case the Japanese, who say, here are the natural phenomena, seismic events, atmospheric events, that may occur in our region.
Then they do a final safety analysis report to determine whether this plant can meet those specific local events.
And then the Japanese, their regulatory agencies, confirm that.
So the Japanese miscalculated on what those natural phenomena could be.
Yet, the American design plant, American built plant, withstood what is called a beyond design basis event.
So we and the media should be praising America.
Praising, praising these, General Electric and their designers.
But essentially here, the meat and potatoes here, the Japanese fail to be honest and say they could experience a nine Richter scale earthquake.
I wouldn't say they failed to be honest about it.
Maybe their assessment was incorrect about the tsunami, because the tsunami is really what caused the failure of the components over there.
The plant handled the earthquake.
The Japanese miscalculated, I would say.
Well, but did they miscalculate?
This plant's 40 years old.
That means that they miscalculated 40 years ago.
Wasn't this intended to be taken offline?
This was intended to be taken offline in 2011.
Yeah.
The Japanese have given it a 10-year life extension.
Well, it's offline.
Yeah.
So my point is, the American nuclear industry, we have designed our plants and analyzed our local events.
We're not going to have a tsunami here.
I know, but you understand as well as anybody.
And I don't mean to be rude here.
I've got a time constraint problem.
You understand that the media is the American left and the left and nuclear power.
There's never, ever going to be a story on good news.
There's nothing positive about nuclear power as far as the left's concerned, even if it's built by a company that's in bed with Obama.
Just isn't going to happen.
Another exciting hour of broadcast excellence in the can, folks, soon to be on its way over to super secret location to be electronically preserved for the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum, which is up and running.
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