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March 24, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:25
March 24, 2011, Thursday, Hour #2
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It's a funny headline, ladies and gentlemen, from Fox News.
Reporter speaks gibberish on air after medical incident.
What's news about that?
When did a reporter not speak gibberish?
Hi.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, Rush Limbaugh.
This is the most listened to radio talk show in the country in the world, the most talked about, the most envied, never equaled, imitated, all of that.
Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, the phone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, LRushbaugh at EIVNet.com.
Mayor Jim Suttle.
Where is this?
Omaha.
Mayor Jim Suttle, Omaha, Nebraska, went to Washington on Tuesday flush with ideas for how federal officials could help cities like Omaha pay for multi-billion dollar sewer projects.
Among the items on his brainstorming list, a proposal for a 10-cent federal tax on every roll of toilet paper you buy.
Based on the four-pack price for Charmin double rolls Tuesday at a Midtown High-V, such a tax would add more than 10% to the per roll price, pushing it over a dollar.
The idea came from a failed 2009 House measure by an Oregon congressman to help cities and the environment.
Yeah, I heard about that.
I said, well, this is simple.
Let's just put it on the table, said Suttle.
It doesn't mean I endorse it.
I'm just putting it out there.
The mayor says that Omaha needs help with the metro area's $1.7 billion bill for federally mandated sewer improvements.
The work must...
What happened to the stimulus?
Wasn't this precisely what the stimulus bill was for?
Nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus, infrastructure, and all that kind of stuff.
And that's what a sewer is.
And now a toilet paper tax.
Just the beginning.
Anthony Weiner, Representative Anthony Weiner, New York, said yesterday he's looking into how a health law waiver might work for New York City.
This is a politico story.
Anthony Weiner says here, likely to run for mayor of New York, said that because of the city's special health care infrastructure, his office was looking into alternatives that might make more sense.
Now, the Politico neglects to mention in this story that Anthony Weiner claimed to have written Obamacare legislation.
That was their scoop, by the way, and they failed to mention it in this story.
They even had the video clip to prove it, in which Weiner says the bill and I are one.
If you read the whole story, you'll read how Weiner talks about how friends got waivers, which is exactly how laws work in third world banana republics.
So here's New York City.
A waiver might work for New York.
Here's the author of the health care bill, the author, the self-proclaimed author of Obamacare, saying that New York will need a waiver in order to survive.
Weiner is one of the healthcare law's biggest supporters.
During the debate leading up to the reform, he was one of the last holdouts in Congress for the public option.
The president said, Weiner did, he said, I wrote the bill.
And the bill and I are one.
The president said, if you have better ideas that can accomplish the same thing, go for it, said Weiner.
Well, I'm in the process now of trying to see if we can take Obama up on that in the city of New York, and I'm taking a look at all the money that we spend, Medicaid and Medicare.
Maybe New York City can come up with a better plan.
Well, I thought this was the end all to health care.
This was everything we needed, and now the nation's largest city needs a waiver from Obama here.
Back to the audio sound by Zbigniew Bzezinski on MSNBC this morning.
He was on there with his daughter, Mika Bzezinski.
So Mika Bjuzhinski asking her father, Zbig Zezhinsky, last time we talked, Dad, you said that the president shouldn't act alone in Libya, that it should be collective action, and they're not calling it war.
Well, it really isn't war.
It's something in between war and military intervention to stop something that's going on, but without intending to conquer the country.
But I have to tell you frankly, Mika, that I cannot think of another instance in recent times in which I myself was so uncertain in thinking about the problem, how we should act, because there are so many downsides and so many uncertainties.
But in the end, I concluded that if we didn't act, it would be worse.
Sounds like we're in a bond movie here.
So Zbeg talking to his daughter Mika, the Bzezinskis on MSNBC, and it's not a war.
It's something in between that and military invention.
Stop something that's going on without intending to conquer the country.
Not according to the American left.
The American left, the kooks out there, think that's exactly what this is about if you listen to them.
Establishing a U.S. base.
They're mad.
These leftists are mad.
Obama's no different than George W. Bush to them in all of this.
Well, according to Mr. Bjzinski, Mr. Snirtley, an act of war is not an act of war unless we're trying to conquer the country, you know, hold territory, so to speak.
And Zbig says that that's not what we're doing.
We're not going here to conquer the place, so it really isn't a war.
And it's not really a military intervention.
It's kinetic military action.
I mean, that's why they've come up with this ludicrous term.
Well, right.
That's why they don't want to call it a war on terror because the Muslims don't intend to occupy us.
They just blew up the World Trade Center.
Of course, you might get some argument on that from certain people.
All of this is nothing more than one of these intellectual exercises to excuse Obama, give him a pass.
It really isn't war.
You know, Democrat presidents don't like using the U.S. military.
If the truth be known, liberals actually are happier when the U.S. military loses.
Liberals don't want military success.
They don't think the world should be shaped that way.
Of course, ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force.
Liberals hate that.
To them, this is a world governed by the aggressive use of speeches.
You know, and all the speeches in the world didn't stop Gaddafi from deciding he wanted to become illegitimate.
So he starts doing what he's doing.
And all these guys.
I mean, I have never seen such pretzel-like maneuvering on the part of Democrats in order to accommodate what else is going on.
Obama's incompetence or else this is just strictly this whole kinetic military action, war, military intervention, whatever they don't want to call it, is nothing more than a PR move to try to elevate Obama's stature from a position they're particularly not particularly happy that he occupies.
But it's like I said in the first hour, this is a joke.
You know, all of this, the commentary about it, the action itself, the lack of an objective, the lack of a withdrawal strategy, no definition of victory.
I mean, it is a joke.
The question is, is it purposefully so?
We look like anything but the solution to the world's problems here.
We look like an utterly aimless, purposeless country here.
You couple that with the fact that we have a president who views this country's past in exactly that way.
Back after this.
CNN is running a crawl, a graphic crawl at the bottom of the screen about Libya.
It says humanitarian crisis feared.
What now?
I thought that's precisely what we had averted.
I thought that's what everybody was taking credit for, that we have averted a humanitarian crisis.
Go back here to number 15, Ed, audio sombre number 15, Zbigniew Bzhinski on MSNBC this morning, explaining what's going on in Libya.
Well, it really isn't war.
It's something in between war and military intervention to stop something that's going on, but without intending to conquer the country.
But I have to tell you frankly, Mika, that I cannot think of another instance in recent times in which I myself was so uncertain in thinking about the problem, how we should act, because there are so many downsides and so many uncertainties.
But in the end, I concluded that if we didn't act, it would be worse.
I wonder if Zeebig would have the same view if they're a Republican in the White House.
I just have that question.
But it really isn't war.
Not war.
Something between war and military intervention.
Stop something that's going on without intending to conquer the country.
To tell you, frankly, Mika, that I cannot think of another instance.
So I thought we'd averted a humanitarian crisis.
But you also heard Zeebig here say that it is not a war because we are not intending to conquer the country.
So I guess the first Gulf War was not a war.
We didn't try to conquer Iraq.
Saddam Hussein was left in place.
The Vietnam War was not a war.
We weren't trying to conquer North Vietnam, right?
So that wasn't a war.
The War of 1812, was that not a war?
We weren't trying to conquer and occupy Great Britain.
We were trying to keep from being conquered and occupied.
This is, you know what, this is not a war.
It's a pickup basketball game.
That's what they're trying to make it look like.
Not just midnight basketball.
This thing's going on around the clock.
Sarah Palin did weigh in.
Was on with Greta Van Susteren on Fox last night during a discussion about the non-war, the kinetic military action in Libya.
Greta Van Susteren said, what should we be doing in Libya, Sarah Palin?
Gaddafi has the blood of innocent Americans on his hands.
He needs to be held accountable for that.
That would happen all those years ago.
Well, now's our opportunity to make sure that he is held accountable.
So when our president said at first that our mission is to see Gaddafi go, he's got to go.
But then we're told by one of his top advisors, the president's top advisor, saying, well, no, really, Gaddafi is probably going to prevail on this.
He's probably going to prevail over the opposition.
And then our president changes the tune again, saying, well, it's not our mission to oust Gaddafi.
A lot of confusion.
I would like to see, of course, as long as we're in it, we better be in it to win it.
And if there's doubt, we get out.
Win it means Qaddafi goes and America gets to get on out of there.
Right.
So that's Palin weighing in on the definition of victory.
With a little Jesse Jackson rhyme thrown in.
If we're in it, better win it.
If there's doubt, we get out.
Win it means Gaddafi goes.
America gets to get on out of there.
And then Van Susteren said, well, Bill Maher just used the vulgarity with you.
Did you guys hear about this?
I had the story yesterday.
This is the one the Now Gang had to apologize for.
They had to chide Maher for what he said.
He referred to her using an obscenity, beginning, a four-letter word, beginning with a word, a letter T.
And the Nags did not really want to come to her defense, but they were kind of forced into it.
It was a demeaning comment about a woman.
So they chided Maher for saying it, but then they also said their statement, look, you Republicans, don't think this means we like you.
Don't think it means that we're on your side about it.
No, we're on to you guys.
We know that you've trapped us into this.
And we have to, it was hilarious.
Oh, come on.
You know what the T word is.
It starts with a T and it ends with a T.
So anyway, that's what Maher called her.
That's what Van Sustern's asking her about here.
Bill Maher, you just used the vulgarity with you.
Now, you may say that you're over it, but it is degrading to women.
That's the problem.
You've got a daughter.
Your daughter's friends.
Everybody's watching has a mother or a sister.
It's degrading.
It does need to be fair.
Nobody's ever promised that life was going to be fair.
In politics, it really isn't fair.
The scrutiny, the double standards, and all that.
By the way, I need now's defense like a fish needs a bicycle.
I don't want them to defend me.
My point is, when a shot is taken at me, it is water off a duck's band because I know the important things in life that we need to concentrate on, especially the national and international issues that are so important in our country.
So as Palin says she doesn't particularly care about it, she's not affected by it.
Which is, I mean, that's the attitude she needs to have.
Look, okay, Snurdy, did you still not know?
Okay, you figured it out now.
Guys, I could say that he called her, we didn't call her a twit.
Does that help?
You know what's amazing?
The people in Riolinda knew this with the first letter.
You required three letters minimum to figure it out.
We go back to the phones, Panama City, Florida, and Scott.
She's gone.
All right.
Diane in West Union, Illinois is next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Rush, Mr. Wonderful.
What a pleasure to speak to you.
It really is an honor.
Thanks very much.
Every day we learn something from you.
Appreciate that.
I do too, actually.
The question I had for you, because I feel like I'm the only one that saw this on TV, I feel like they're using everything that's happening, like in Libya, to take away everything that we're seeing.
Yesterday morning, I happened to see on TV on Fox Obama's little speech there in Brazil.
He said that we're going to give them $2 billion to drill oil, and we'll be the best customers that they ever had.
Nobody's talking about it.
You know, you're right.
And I must admit that I didn't mention it here on this program.
The reason I didn't is that I have mentioned it.
And don't misunderstand.
I just want to say for the record, we have mentioned Obama and his associations with Petrobras for months on this, $10 billion to start their drilling.
Just last week, we had a story where we were giving them even more money for a floating underwater oil storage depot.
That's horrible.
While not permitting domestic drilling in this country, we are paying and investing Brazil's oil drilling and distribution largely because I think, it's not the only reason, George Soros is a primary investor in Petrobras.
Right, right.
I mean, we can invest $2 billion there but not create any jobs here with oil production or coal or anything else.
Oh, we've got to shut down our oil production here.
Meanwhile, the Chikoms can explore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico with the Cubans.
The Vietnamese are looking into it.
And of course, our friends, the Mexicans, continue to drill.
Don't half of them have drilling off our shores anyways.
Yeah.
But our people can't have any jobs or create any wealth doing this.
It makes you wonder.
It does make you wonder.
All right.
I mean, we half expected him to make this little sidestep.
Oh, wait, and by the way, a correction.
George Soros pulled out of Petrobras last August, I'm told.
Still has some shares in it, but he pulled out most of his investment there.
So this is a strict investment with the country now.
Obama to Brazil.
We'll be back.
Phoenix, Arizona, as we stay on the phones.
Teresa, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hello.
God bless you.
God bless everybody.
I just have a question to my government, if you don't mind my using your show to get to them because they don't answer my calls.
Now, they listen to this show, I guarantee you, so you will be heard here.
I have a question about protecting the people, and that's supposedly why we're doing this latest civil action, apparently, being it's not a war.
This is not a civil action.
This is kinetic military action.
Well, if they're so concerned about protecting people, why didn't we get involved in Rwanda?
Why not the Sudan?
Why aren't they concerned about protecting the people in Arizona on the border of Mexico?
There's a slaughter happening.
There's a lot of crime.
Texas, New Mexico, all of the borders.
And why aren't we protecting the innocent of all innocent, the unborn babies?
If you're so concerned about protecting people, why aren't we protecting all people?
This is a lie.
I'm tired of being used as a pawn and thinking that, like your parody was explaining about being gullible, we're not gullible.
Stop lying to us.
That's a good question.
I've raised it myself.
We've got people starving in Darfur, genocide in Darfur.
We've got people being slaughtered in Syria and Iran.
And we take no action.
So this is, I think, in all candor, one of the reasons why Libya is it was thought, listen to these people, we'll be out of there in a week.
They thought so.
They're dealing, they're dealing in their minds, they're dealing with a genuine lunatic here, Muamar Gaddafi.
No big deal.
How hard can this possibly be?
They don't have an Air Force.
They don't have anything.
Have to trust that Obama has bona fides to do this kind of stuff.
I think it's all PR.
Look, we can speculate on the reasons here, and most of them are not pretty.
Most of them are not satisfying.
Most of them are not intellectually honest.
The White House, folks, you're asking me, the White House has got different versions of what the purpose is.
Purpose to get him out of there.
Others say, no, it's not.
Humanitarian mission.
We've got to make him be nice to his people.
We've got to stop criticizing them when they yell at him.
It's a joke.
This is utter incompetence.
And to have now all this defined as kinetic military action, this is almost beneath my pay grade to analyze.
This is almost so stupid, I can't get my arms around it.
And I really fear that if I was able to totally understand this, that I'd have to slice off a bunch of my own IQ to figure it out.
The Libyan government's not going to vote Democrat.
I mean, you live in the kidnapping capital of the world.
You live in Phoenix.
And so your state's being sued by Obama.
The Libyan government is not going to vote for Democrats.
That's another reason why there's no action being taken.
If the Libyan government was going to vote Democrat, there's another thing.
Obama is taking a real risk here.
He's had Louis Farrakhan ask him, who the hell do you think you are?
And Reverend Wright's now back out.
He's not saying favorable things.
Yes, part of it's fun.
I have to admit.
Part of it's fun here to watch, analyze, and so forth.
But when you get past that, I don't know about you.
I don't like seeing either this kind of purposeful making the country look like a joke or this kind of incompetence at the highest levels.
Either one.
Frank in Charleston, South Carolina, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
I'm a first-time caller.
I'm not a trained articulate broadcaster, so please bear with me.
All right.
Okay, Rush, my call is regarding the SIU's plot or plan of Mr. Lerner to get mortgage holders to withhold 10% of their mortgages.
Yes.
Is this part of a bigger plan or plot?
And how can we know if it is not investigated and the media will not report on this?
Well, now, one thing, and I say this with some suspicion and doubt myself, that Lerner is not a member of the SEIU anymore.
The story is Stephen Lerner was tossed out of there.
So the reason that that's being made public is everybody does not associate this theory or this strategy with the SEIU, that this guy is a lone wolf, so to speak.
Now, your question, could it work?
That's what everybody's been asking me.
Could a strategy designed to bring down Wall Street, to destroy the wealth of individuals there, to destroy the banking business for the effective purpose of taking $17 trillion they have and redistributing it back to people that this learner guy thinks have had it stolen from them.
Could it work?
You might say that this was tried in 2008.
Do we really know what precipitated it?
We have the subprime mortgage crisis, and what was that?
The subprime mortgage crisis, if I may be blunt and honest, was a series of government directives to lending institutions demanding that they loan money to people who could not pay it back under the guise of affordable housing, fairness, making things equal in the country or what have you.
But if you are going to use the power of the government to tell banks you've got to give these people money, essentially, they're not going to be able to pay it back.
What are you doing to them?
Are you not launching an assault on them as is?
Now, the thing that the left never considers is the dynamic aspect of what they do or the dynamic aspect of the economy.
They look at everything statically.
They see a tax increase on the rich.
Oh, that's going to generate X numbers of dollars.
They don't factor what the rich will do to avoid paying it.
So they slap these demands on lenders.
Banks, you're going to make loans to people that can't afford it.
Well, what are the banks going to?
They're going to try to figure out a way to get that money back somehow or shift and pass the loss down the line to somebody else, which is what happened in the form of new financial products called derivatives and collateralized debt obligations and all this other gobbledygooky gook terminology that we heard.
And where did it lead?
Well, it led in 2008 to a financial crisis that we were told could collapse the world financial system if we didn't bail out the banks with tarp in 24 hours.
So you ask yourself, has it been tried maybe on a much more sophisticated level than this renegade SEIU guy, Stephen Lerner?
You need to ask George Soros if there's a guy who would love to see this happen, it would be George Soros.
Let's find it.
Could George Soros do it?
He brought down the British pound.
Could it happen?
Could this learner guy actually pull the could he succeed in getting enough people to just stop paying on their mortgages?
His theory is just stop paying.
There's such a backlog of foreclosures.
You're going to be in your house for at least a year and not paying for it.
And that's going to take wealth away from this.
His whole theory is that debt, debt that has been defined, manufactured the rates of the debt, the percentages set by the lenders.
And that is how the lenders have gotten rich, by separating the middle class from its hard-earned money by making everything meaningful to them so expensive they have to borrow money to get it from a house to a car to a college education and that depletes them of disposable income So their standard of living never rises.
And these people are going to have to pay.
So we need to get this money back that debt has robbed everybody of and redistribute it.
Does he have any allies in the White House?
He's a former SEIU guy.
We know he has allies on the left.
We know this is Cloward Piven.
They just want to create total chaos.
They want the system to collapse and plode upon itself.
As to whether or not this guy could actually pull it off and convince enough people to do this, who knows?
The interesting thing to me is that there are a lot of people probably sympathetic to this who would love to bring this about.
They're people that hate this country as it's constituted.
There are people that despise capitalism.
There are people who are totally comfortable, totally willing to believe that they'd be as rich as anybody if it hadn't been stolen from them.
Not that they didn't have the ability to earn it, they didn't work hard enough, or what have you.
So I don't live in fear of this particular incident, but I am very much aware that there are kook, fringe leftists who want to destroy this country as it exists.
I don't know how many of them are in the White House.
That's what really bothers me.
Guys like Lerner, when you learn of the plan, it's going to be like the Roadrunner and Coyote.
It's the people inside the White House trying to pull something like this off that we don't know about that, frankly, if they exist, worry me more.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair and in the process, just to irritate the liberals to Cincinnati.
This is Ron.
Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network.
Great to have you with us.
Hi.
Thank you very much for taking my call, Rush.
It is an honor to speak with you.
I know.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Hey, the reason I'm calling, I think I've got it.
I think I know why or what he's up to in Libya.
I don't know if you recall in the previous administration, Bush would often send out very, very high folks in his administration to explain how he was defending the power of the presidency.
And it was bigger than himself.
It was that he needed to be careful and protect and expand the power of the institution.
And I think what we've got going on right now is Obama is busy tearing that down so that future presidents are going to be incapable of garnering the support that they need to take action on our behalf in the world.
Well, I must respectfully disagree with this.
I don't think a guy who has authoritarian desires and tendencies wants to diminish the office that gives him that power.
I would fully agree with you if your speculation was that he was trying to diminish the aura and the role of the United States in the world as the arbiter of world events.
I think that really bugs people like Obama.
I think this notion that whatever happens in the world, the U.S. is involved, has to be involved, has national interests, I think that bothers the heck out of them.
I think they've resented it.
They blame so much of the world's problems on the United States being involved in things outside our own borders, hence all the apologies that the president has given.
I don't think he wants to diminish the office of the president.
If he's going to do that, he's still got two years to go in it.
I can understand why you would think that, but he's got to know, too, that future office holders are going to be Democrats.
He wants them to have all kinds of extra constitutional authority.
Here's a guy denying federal court rulings on his own health care.
He's a guy that's ignoring federal health court rulings on drilling moratorium, the unconstitutionality of his health care bill.
This is a guy who has czars that are unaccountable.
We don't know.
They don't have to be confirmed.
We don't know who they are, what they do, what they're paid.
They answer to nobody but him.
He has lived by executive order.
He is extra-constitutional and congressional as much as he can.
I, with all due respect, think it's the exact opposite.
I think what he's trying to do is amass and coalesce the power of the presidency because that's his nature, his ego, and all that.
But when it comes to taking action that would diminish the role of the country in the world, yeah, now you might be talking.
A Hillsboro County, Florida judge is under withering attack from conservatives for saying he will use Islamic law to decide if an arbitration award was correct.
Used Islamic law in Florida.
He's under attack.
He wants to explain himself.
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