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March 18, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:23
March 18, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Yeah, we might jip it.
I might jip the president.
The president's coming out here to talk about Libya.
And I might ask some questions.
In the middle of his statement.
I don't know.
I'll make up my mind when he starts.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
The media is all waiting breathlessly, tongues on the ground.
Waiting for Obama to come out, say whatever he's going to say about Libya.
I don't know if he's going to take any questions.
If he does take any questions, will anybody ask him what are American objectives in Libya?
What are our national interests there?
Will anybody ask him what are our political objectives?
Will anybody ask him what is our exit strategy?
Will anybody ask him what victory looks like?
Will anybody ask him if he worries that we're getting into a quagmire?
You know, all these questions that Bush got.
I wonder if Obama will get those questions.
Ha.
How are you?
It's Rush Limbaugh.
This, the EIB network.
Nation's most listened to radio talk show for a reason.
It's a good show.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882.
Whatever you want to talk about on Friday is fine.
Monday through Thursday.
It has to be about something I care about today as evidence.
I don't have to care about it, but I'll fake it.
I'll do my best.
And that's well known, well-established, a tremendous career risk taken by one of the most powerful major media figures in all of media figures.
Open line Friday.
No, I'm serious.
Mr. Obama, you were not in favor of regime change in Iraq.
But you have said Mubarak has to go, and you now think Gaddafi has to go.
Was Saddam Hussein not as bad as Gaddafi?
Didn't he use poison gas on his own citizens?
You think that's what I'm saying.
Nobody's going to have the guts to ask him these questions.
Let's review.
And here are the questions that Bush got.
What are our objectives?
What's U.S. national interest?
What are our political objectives?
What's the exit strategy?
What's victory going to look like?
What are you going to do if we get into a quagmire?
I wonder if anybody will ask Obama, sir, are there any other regimes out there that you think we should, maybe you should think we should change?
I don't know.
These are the questions I would ask if I were to get a press pass.
But of course, that would never happen.
I don't even know if I would apply for one.
The House of Representatives voted yesterday to cut off financing for national public radio.
Democrats and Republicans fiercely divided over both the content of the bill and how it was brought to the floor.
Across the rotundas, the Senate approved a short-term spending measure passed earlier in the week by the House that would keep the government financed through April the 8th.
Now, the NPR bill, sponsored by Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican of Colorado, would mean that stations could not buy programming from NPR or any other source using the $22 million they get from the federal government.
The time's come for us to claw back this money, said Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican of Tennessee.
Thursday's measure, which House Republicans rushed to the floor before a one-week recess begins, passed at 228 to 192.
All the Democrats who were there and seven Republicans voted against it.
One Republican, Representative Justin Amish, voted present.
The bill, should the Senate even bring it to the floor, is almost certain to fail there.
Democrats control the Senate.
Members of both parties have expressed skepticism about cutting off NPR because it remains popular among many of their constituents.
Louise Slaughter.
Why are we wasting valuable floor time on an ideological battle?
She says.
Yeah, like, why do we waste all that time on health care?
What the hell was that if it wasn't ideological, Ms. Slaughter?
There's an NPR exec here expressed grave concern.
Joyce Slocum, at a time when other news organizations are cutting back and the voices of pundits are drowning out fact-based reporting, thoughtful analysis, NPR and public radio stations are delivering in-depth news and information respectfully and with civility.
Don't cut us back.
Hey, by the way, this next story, I like this.
This is from Philly.com.
It's actually an AP story.
Bucking a national trend of raising cigarette taxes, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island have considered dropping, reducing cigarette taxes, hoping to draw smokers from other states and increase revenue.
Yes, I've been waiting for this.
It makes perfect sense.
These states are all funding programs with taxes derived from the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products.
So they're going to think about lowering cigarette taxes to draw more tax revenue from smokers in other high-tax states.
Very, very smart frustration with Obama bills.
This is from Roll Call.
President Barack Obama's laissez-faire approach to the ongoing spending debate, winning him few friends on Capitol Hill.
This is like the third article recently where the Democrats are saying we're losing the budget debate and they're complaining about Obama.
The third article.
I mean, had a couple of them yesterday.
There's real discontent.
The guy's not there.
He's not even voting present.
He's not showing up.
He's leaving all the dirty work to them.
And the question I have with all of this, like this roll call, you know, guy from roll call could just as easily be Biden's new press secretary.
It had to be somebody from the Washington Post.
Could pick somebody from NBC or CBS or ABC.
It doesn't matter.
All these stories on we're losing the budget debate because Obama is not playing a role in it.
Why the timidity on our side?
Why is our side acting scared to death when the Democrats think they're losing the budget debate?
I got to tell you, if I'm the Democrat caucus in the House or the Senate, I have to be asking myself, how could we be so lucky?
We got shellacked.
We got shellacked in November.
They ought to be mopping the floor with us here every day.
And they're acting like they're afraid of us.
The guys who won in a record, almost record landslide are acting like they're afraid of us.
They're afraid of the media.
Imagine what it must have felt like to be a Democrat last November to lose and get shellacked like they did.
Imagine what it must have felt like the House was going to be like as a place to go to work.
They really felt.
They don't doubt the Tea Party.
Tea Party instilled the fear of God in them.
Our guys somehow don't like the Tea Party.
Want to try to marginalize the Tea Party.
It's a bunch of kooks or nuts or whatever, I guess, to these guys.
So the Democrats were thinking, oh, geez, this is going to be horrible.
The floor mopped with us every day.
And they're probably just stunned that the Republicans are acting afraid of them or intimidated by them.
There was a Daily Caller story a couple days ago.
GOP leaders, mainline caucus fume at conservative no votes on three-week continuing resolution.
This is a story about how the leadership was livid, that the freshmen, some of the freshmen, the Tea Party caucus, did not go along with a $6 billion.
And by the way, how about this is irony?
How about this?
The day that the leadership very proudly, very happily passed this $6 billion in spending cuts in the continuing resolution.
And the Speaker, John Boehner, went out, there were serious cuts, meaningful cuts, $10 billion.
$72 billion was added to budget deficit the same day.
$72 billion added to the budget deficit the same day the House Republicans were all ecstatic at cutting $6 billion from it.
Can't go there, huh?
Can't do that.
$105 billion for Obamacare.
Oh, no, no, you can't break the rules to do that.
No way.
USA Today had a story.
Tea Party activists irked over fiscal representation in the House.
Tea Party activists knew dozens of members that they got elected to Congress in November could not balance the budget or eliminate the country's debt overnight.
Now their patience seems to be running out.
Tea Party officials across the country said they were angered to see more than 30 Tea Party-backed members of Congress voting for the three-week continuing resolution passed by the House of Representatives this week, which included $6 billion in cuts.
So these 30 Tea Party men, and they're hearing about it from their voters and their constituents.
And everybody's scratching their heads.
How can the Democrats, the Democrats are actually scared.
They're frustrated.
They think they're on the verge.
They could be losing the budget battle.
And they could be.
That's the sad thing.
They could be losing this budget battle big, which would mean the nation is winning it.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Yeah, I saw that.
There's a school named after Obama that's closing budget problems.
But folks, you know, this business that the House cuts $6 billion in spending and the deficit was added to by $72 billion on the same day.
There's another statistic that I saw.
That's not a stat, it's a fact.
We are borrowing $5 billion a day to service the debt.
We're borrowing $5 billion a day, and the House is wanting kudos for a continuing resolution that cuts $6 billion in three weeks.
Meaningful cuts.
See, we heard you.
We heard you last November.
You said budget cuts, and by golly, we're doing it.
$6 billion here.
No, we're going to borrow $12 billion the next two days, $5 billion every day, $72 billion added to the deficit in one day.
It doesn't add up.
To the phones, Jacksonville, Florida.
Patrick, I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIV Network.
Hello.
Hey, how are you doing, Rush?
Very good.
Thank you.
I just came off from a great day of golf at the beach this morning.
Was driving down A1A when that teacher called in, and I nearly bit the end of my cigar off.
Which teacher was there?
We've had a couple here.
The one from Wisconsin that said he'd be glad to take a cut, and they're doing great things in Wisconsin, and that you're denigrating all teachers with.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I remember the guy, right?
Can I ask you a quick question about your golf game before I tee off on this show?
Oh, by all means, it's Open Line Friday.
When you were on the Hannity show, one day they're talking about you hit your drive 300 yards, and everybody I play golf with, I talk to, oh, I hit my drive 300 yards.
I'm just curious, what are the basic yardages on your club, like your eight-iron, your five-iron, your driver?
I hit the eight-iron, 155.
I hit my five-iron about 190 wedge all the way up to 125 or 130.
What's your driver?
Oh, 280.
If I really smeared, it depends.
The longest drive I've ever hit, unwind-aided, was at on the Apollo Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles, easily 340.
Wow.
There's only one guy, and this is testimony from Al Michaels.
I played with him there.
There's only one guy he's ever seen hit it farther on that hole in similar circumstances, and that was Pete Sampras.
Now, admittedly, I hit it over a hill and there was some downhill roll to it.
That's still.
I still creamed that baby.
Well, I was impressed with your improvement on that show.
That was remarkable to watch.
Thank you.
My average drive is probably an average drive of whatever 14 holes I use a driver, 13 holes in a round, probably 275, 270, something like that.
You're longer than Jim Furik.
Yeah, but not telling you where mine end up.
Back to that teacher.
You know, I live in Jacksville.
We have one of the top prep schools in the nation here, Bowles.
And you could actually, for what they're paying to educate or not educate a kid in Wisconsin and most other districts around here, you could send a child to that prep school.
And when they come out, they're ready for college.
I mean, they're not kids when they come out.
They're young adults.
And this guy is saying he'd take less to go into the private sector.
The difference is there isn't a private school around that pays $100,000 a year to teachers.
They can't do it.
In the private sector, you have to live within what your budget brings in.
You can't sell a product for more than it's worth.
And yet this guy in the public sector going, oh, I'd go in the private sector in a minute.
If I could get more money, the thing is, he knows he can't get more money in the private sector.
It's just not going to happen.
Private sectors pay about half what public schools make.
It's incredible.
And yet they're educating the kids.
But the other thing is they have discipline in the schools.
They're teaching kids to do chants up there and not to read.
I mean, I would think those teachers would be better if they talk about this.
I mean, Taysom, this notion that they're doing all this for the kids, even the NEA outgoing general counsel said, we don't have power because we're doing it for the kids.
We have power because we have 3.2 million dues-paying members to the Democrat Party.
That's what he was saying.
We have power because the Democrat Party loves us because we have 3.2 million people to pay dues, which go right to the Democrat Party.
His name is Bob Channon.
We've heard the audio once before.
We'll get it again.
Now, one thing in this teacher's defense, when I was talking to him, I wasn't totally convinced that he was talking specifically teachers' jobs in the private sector.
That he might go do anything else in the private sector.
Not just teach, if he wanted to.
And I don't think private schools pay benefits.
If they do, it's not nearly the benefits that these union guys are getting.
That's Patrick.
Thanks.
Did you say you're on your way to play or you're just coming?
I played this morning down at the beach.
What course?
Ponometer.
You played Pony?
Ponometer Inning Club?
Yeah.
Oh, it's a great course.
They have two, actually two out there, the Ocean and the Lagoon.
You play the TPC?
You played the players' championship course?
No, no, we played Ponviter Inn Club.
It's a five-star resort down here.
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know where I've never been.
Oh, you need to come up and stay there.
Yeah, I've had a lot of people.
I can't tell you, the powerful, influential member of the media, the number of invitations I've gotten.
It's just never worked out time-wise.
Well, come up to TPC and go watch the tournament and go out and play some golf there.
I appreciate that.
Thanks, Patrick.
Enjoy your day.
You have a good weekend.
Claire in Austin, Texas.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hello, Mega Ditto.
Thank you.
Well, I was just calling to tell you that I'm doing what you have charged me to do.
I'm teaching our viewpoint.
I have to counteract all the liberals that I work with.
Really?
Yeah.
Get into trouble for it?
Excuse me?
Do you get any trouble for it?
No, never.
Ever.
I just counteract what they say.
I have a teacher who teaches science in my school, and she uses Al Gore's movie to teach it.
So when they come to my class, I have to contradict what they're learning in that science class.
I teach language art, so it gives me a lot of time to teach, have discussions with my students.
Well, how many are there like you at your school?
Oh, maybe six.
Six?
Yeah.
I'm surprised it's that many.
Well, me too.
And because I teach in Austin, which is a very liberal town.
Oh, yeah.
I'm very much well aware of what goes on in Austin.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I've even been there.
Okay.
Snuck in and out.
Nobody knew I was there when I was there, but I was all right.
Claire, I appreciate it.
This is Baron, Pensacola, Florida, next on the EIB Network, Open Line Friday.
Hi.
Hey, how you doing?
Very good, sir.
Okay.
Yes, I was calling in reference to unions and what they developed.
What I was saying was my term for unions is are social fetuses of not for all people that are in the union because the majority of people in unions take their job.
They appreciate the pay.
They like the benefits.
They're loyal where they work.
But there are.
Wait a minute.
I want to make sure I heard you right here, Baron.
You believe that unions are like the fetus of the mafia.
Well, yeah, they're gestating in there in the mafia womb.
The structure is the same.
The structure is the same.
The development comes from a development to create a need, and they have an entitlement, and they get committed to that, and they're frustrated to think that they'd lose it.
When you talk about in the mafia, they want to dirty a guy, they dirty him, and then he's protected, and he knows that his Baron, this is Barron's way of explaining the money laundering operation and how it works.
And meaning when they dirty a guy up, I mean, they corrupt you, they own you, then you're paying them correct protection and all that.
It's a problem of it because these fetuses are never aborted.
That's the one problem with your comparison.
All right, I don't know what he said.
Obama just finished laying out whatever we're going to do in Iran.
Sorry, Libya.
So it happened largely during our last broadcast segment.
So during this bottom-of-the-hour break, I was going back and forth listening to analysts, various cable networks, and they all had a different story.
They all had a different view of what Obama said that he was going to do.
What I can gather here, and I ought to really wait until I have a full transcript of this, but he said, apparently no ground troops, but we are going to spearhead an effort.
He might not have said it, but if we're involved, we do.
There's no other way around that.
So I really, I should, I need to refrain here until I actually know full-fledged what he said rather than guess it.
But I did find it interesting that there's, go back and forth.
These very cable networks should get a whole different take on what he said and whether or not it's good or bad makes any sense, depending on who the he specifically said the U.S. was not going to take a leadership position.
He specifically said we are not.
He said this is how diplomacy ought to be done.
No one nation leads.
They all just get together here and enforce international.
Oh, we're not going to take a leadership.
Oh, I got it totally right.
Whoa, we're not going to take a leadership.
We're just all going to throw our hats in the names in the hat and draw numbers for our responsibilities.
Should be interesting.
Who's next?
Evan in West Coxaki, New York.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey.
I'm just wondering, when you listen to music, like with your hearing aid, how does it sound?
Music?
Yeah, like if you listen to music on iPad or something.
Well, not very good.
I cannot listen to music that I've never heard before and identify the melody.
I have a cochlear implant.
It doesn't have nearly the sensitivity of the human ear.
It's not even close.
So, like, violins or strings sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
So, oh, I was just wondering.
It's, you know what I have to do?
I can still listen to music, but it has to be music that I knew and that I've heard before I lost my hearing.
And what happens is that my brain, fertile mind, provides the melody.
I actually am not hearing the melody.
And the way I can prove this to you, sometimes it will take me, even a song that I know, it will take me 30 seconds to identify it if I don't know what it is.
Now, look, if I'm playing a song off iTunes and the title is there and it starts and it gets done, then I can spot it from the middle.
But if I'm listening to a song from the beginning and I don't know what it is, it sometimes can take me 30 seconds to recognize it, if I knew it before.
But the quality of music that I hear is less than AM radio in terms of fidelity.
I don't have, I can turn the bass up on an amplifier and I don't hear any difference at all.
I can feel the floor vibrate, but I don't hear any more bass.
I can turn highs up and I can hear the difference in the highs.
But on the low end, I actually cannot.
I'm getting a note here.
It says, you're not missing anything.
There aren't any melodies in music today.
At any rate, you adapt to it.
I've adapted.
The worst part of my hearing is being in a crowd.
Like right now, I hear myself as well as I heard myself when I could hear.
If I'm talking to one other person in a quiet room, I can comprehend 95% of what they say, depending on how fast they're speaking.
There are some words that sound alike.
But you add room noise.
Like if Catherine and I are watching TV, if she wants to talk to me about what we're watching, I have to hit pause or the mute because I cannot hear what she's saying.
Even if she's sitting two feet away, I will not, as long as there are other noises there, any room noise when added to other room noise is going to be louder than the one voice that I'm trying to hear.
And I've got the implant on my left side.
So if I go out in a public place, anybody on my right side, it's hopeless.
I'll have to literally turn to them.
And sometimes as I turn to them, they turn with me.
They don't know what I'm doing.
So we'll do pirouettes until I finally say, no, you stay where you are.
I'm trying to position my ears so I can hear you.
It's the way I look at this, though, because when I tell these stories, oh, that's really horrible.
No, it's not.
If you look at the timeline of humanity, however long it is, 10,000 years, a million, billion, whatever the number is, my little time on it is not much larger than a pebble of sand or a grain of sand.
And yet, I happened to lose my hearing at the same time technology had evolved to the point where cochlear implants had been invented.
If I had lost my hearing 15 years ago, it would have meant the end of my career.
I would not have been able to hear.
And the doctor said, you might think that you could speak normally just by virtue of memory and feel, the way voice feels when you speak, but you wouldn't.
Eventually, your speech would deteriorate and it would sound to people as though you had a speech defect.
It would just be automatic, no matter how good you are, how professional you are at it.
So that's really fortunate.
It's almost miraculous that my being afflicted with this autoimmune disease happens to coincide.
So yeah, well, some call it divine intervention.
Some call it the Age of Miracles.
We are all one way or another as part of this Age of Miracles.
But music is the one thing that I'm, but you know what else?
This is another thing.
It makes it very difficult to compatibility with other people in normal circumstances takes a big hit.
For example, my most comfortable is sheer quiet now.
The ringing of a phone or I'll be sitting in my library and there'll be a noise.
I remember we had been working on the alarm system and I hadn't been told we were working on the alarm system.
And every 30 seconds, something in the room would beep.
And I said, oh my gosh, that smoke detector?
What the hell?
I'd have to call somebody, come into the office, say, where is this coming from?
And what is it?
Because I can't tell where sound is coming from.
And I had no idea what it was.
One time the phone was left off the hook.
And there was street noise.
It was the phone at the gate.
And it was street noise, but it didn't sound like street noise to me.
It sounded, I don't even remember what it sounded like, but I couldn't pinpoint what it was.
The phone was still on the hook, but the mute button on the speakerphone was on, so, or off.
So I was hearing it, but had no idea where it was coming.
I had to call somebody in and say, what is this?
Where is it coming from?
Because you always worry about something blowing up when there's a sound that you don't know.
But I crave silence, blessed silence, because anything other than speech is just noise.
It is irritating noise.
Well, most people go crazy in quiet environments.
They don't like it.
Most people love having the TV on in the background or some sort of sound or other people running.
It irritates me.
It irritates the heck out of me just because it's just noise and I can't identify it.
I mean, I know if it's noise on TV, but I can't specify, I can't tell you what somebody's saying.
I have to have closed captioning to understand everything being said in a TV pro, particularly if there's a music soundtrack.
And nobody, very few people use closed captioning.
It distracts them.
Me, I need it.
No, I'm not just getting old and cranky, snurgly.
And going in public to a restaurant is, depending on the place, it is impossible.
It literally can be impossible to have a conversation except with anybody on the left.
And in some places, I have to get within an inch of what they're saying to be able to accomplish.
I hear everything, but making sense of it.
See, the human hair has 35,000 hair cells in each ear.
They're microscopic, but they still are different sizes and widths, lengths, and they vibrate when they sense noise, sound, or whatever, and they start the whole process of energy through the audio nerve.
Well, the autoimmune system killed all 35,000 hair cells in both ears.
So they're laying down.
They're still in there, but they're laying down.
A cochlear implant, I've got eight electrodes.
And I'm actually now down to six because two of them were causing facial ticks when the volume got too high.
My eyes were closing spastic.
So I had to deactivate the two of those electrodes.
So I'm down to six.
So I've got six man-made bionic electrodes trying to do the job of 35,000 or 70,000 hair cells in terms of frequency response and all that.
And it just, there's no way.
It just can't be done.
The technology has not improved.
Now, what has improved is hearing, like this esteem thing that we talk about, if you have residual hearing, that's miraculous.
The hardware hasn't changed.
There are some software improvements.
For example, with the implant I have, there's a program called Hi-Res, which activates 20 electrodes, but it doesn't work for me.
Everybody's dimmer.
They turn on those 20 electrodes.
I've got them in there.
You turn on the 20, and everybody sounds like the chipmunks to me.
It's worse.
And that's the digital.
I'm using the analog.
The analog, in my case, everybody has one of these things has a different experience.
Everybody says you need to get one on your right side.
Now, I kept the right side clear because there might have been a cure for these dead hair cells.
Now I've been told there won't be.
So if I get an implant on the right side, that would solve some of the spatial stuff.
And it would enable me to hear people on my right side if I'm in a public place or what have you.
But music, it's amazing what the memory can do.
When I'm listening to music that I love, that I've known in my, in fact, I can create the music without even hearing it.
Your memory, your mind can do that.
I'm a little long here.
I've got to take a quick break.
We'll do it.
Be back with much more right after this.
Look, folks, don't get the wrong idea.
Having a cochlear implant has a lot of positives.
I was out playing golf the other day, a bunch of guys, and there was a loudmouthed crow in a palm tree right on the T-box, no more than 10 feet above us.
The thing was cawing like crazy.
You just wanted to grab something, throw it at the damn bird to shut up.
And it was screwing everybody's T-shots off.
I mean, you can't, these guys would swing, and right at the moment, and you could just see all I did was take my implant off, gently place it on the ground, and total silence.
No distractions whatsoever.
However, I do have tinnitus.
Some people say tinnitus in my right ear, which is, in my case, I constantly hear Gregorian chants.
That's the noise in my right ear.
But I've got so used to it, I don't hear it unless I stop to focus on it.
But it's always there.
Edmund Cumberland, Rhode Island, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello, sir.
Hello.
Yeah, hi.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
What I'm wondering about is you never mention the office jobs like computer programmers and call centers that are going to India, basically.
Also, the Indians, the people from India being hired by companies I know here in Rhode Island anyways, from as programmers replacing Americans.
Yeah.
Well, we have discussed this on many occasions.
It hasn't come up recently, but I have discussed it.
We've gone into it in great detail.
In fact, this is, interestingly enough, you know where this is next going to rear its head when they bring immigration back.
That's folks, let me warn you, illegal immigration, dealing with that, don't think that's on the back burner.
They're going to bring that back.
And we start talking about the H-1BV visas.
The immigration debate's going to focus on why do we have no limit.
Well, I don't have time to get into detail, but what you said here, Edmund, is going to be a central focus when this debate revives itself.
I don't know when they're going to bring it up, those in favor of it, but you know that's lurking.
It's going to happen.
And that's when it'll next be discussed in great detail, back after this.
Sadly, my friends, we are out of precious and busy broadcast moments, but it's been a fun week.
Oh, gee, I'm glad I remembered this.
I have a charity golf tournament that I committed to on Monday.
So I'm not going to be here.
Is it Mark Davis that we've got Monday?
Mark Davis from Dallas will be here Monday.
I'll be back.
Look, somebody's got to do these charity golf things.
That always seems to be me.
So I'll see you on Tuesday.
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