Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings once again to you, music lovers and thrill seekers and conversationalists all across the bountiful, plentiful, fruited plane.
I am Rush Limbaugh.
This is the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number 800, 282-2882, the email address lrushball at EIBnet.com.
In his weekly press conference this morning, Speaker Boehner said there is no agreement on a budget number.
This is all so fatuous.
Do you realize we're talking one of the differences?
$70 billion and $40 billion for a week.
I mean, that's the spread on this.
This is so inconsequential.
And Andy McCarthy, my old buddy at National Review Online, had an interesting post yesterday.
Why have we gotten ourselves into a circumstance here where we're debating time?
We're in a debate with these guys over time.
We need to get another contingent resolution for another 10 days, another week.
Why are we talking about the money specifically?
Why are we allowing them to make the rules and hold us hostage to some timeline?
Which I think is an argument that has some merit.
Boehner said there's no agreement on a budget number.
In fact, he said that they were closer to a deal last night than they are this morning, which makes me wonder about the internal polls.
I mean, if Boehner is going to sit there and say they were closer to a deal last night than this morning, it means the Democrats are hardening their position, which means the Democrats could have internal polling data showing that the Republicans are going to end up, the majority get the blame for the shutdown if it happens.
At any rate, I'm getting bored with it.
I'm getting bored with the whole thing.
In fact, the latest, I'm not going to mention any names here, but a well-known broadcast engineer just approached me and asked me a question.
Is it true tax refund checks might not be mailed during the shutdown?
I said, yes, very true.
And I said, it's outrageous.
What also isn't going to happen is military pay.
And I'm going to tell you, the Social Security checks are going to go out.
Now, Obama has sent troops all over the world into battle, and they're not going to get paid.
And I understand, speaking of Boehner, that Boehner has a separate bill that he's brought forth that would do nothing but compensate uniformed military personnel around the world that are tied up in these conflicts and put the pressure on the Democrats to oppose that.
We'll see what manifests itself out of that.
Harry Reid said it's not acceptable.
That, okay.
Well, that again tells me that the Democrats are being told by their pollsters that they are winning the shutdown PR game.
If Harry Reid is going to sit there and say, no, this is this bill to pay the soldiers, not good enough, then they must have polling data to back up their tough stand.
We'll see as time unfolds.
On this refund business, I know it's, when I was young, let's see, 1970, 25 years old, I was working for the Kansas City Royals.
And I was a neophyte.
I didn't know diddly squat.
And there are a lot of co-workers, friends of mine, who started bragging about their big refunds every year, how they were screwing the government.
So I wondered what I was doing wrong.
How come these guys are screwing the government and getting, I mean, multiple $1,000 refunds.
I'm making $12,000 a year.
And if I got a refund, it was like $75 or some such thing, if at all.
My father's secretary did my taxes.
I would send her every credit card receipt.
I did what I thought you had to do, send in all these expense vouchers and so forth.
And she finally told me, that doesn't matter.
You don't earn enough money to have deductions.
We're just going to take your W-2.
We're going to figure it out.
We can do your return in five minutes.
You don't need to bother sending me all these credit card receipts and stuff.
Well, I was further deflated.
It wasn't until much later that I found out the only reason people were getting big refunds is because the government was screwing them.
People were over-withholding.
And some were doing it on purpose.
Some it was accidental.
But they over-withheld so that they would get the refund.
They wanted a lump sum of thousands of dollars to go out and buy a refrigerator or to brag that they got a big refund or what have you.
But it didn't take me long, once I started looking into this, to figure out that if you get a big refund, you're getting screwed because the government's keeping your money all that year.
You're not getting any interest on it.
You're not getting any use of it.
You're allowing more to be withheld than what's necessary.
So my tax philosophy is to owe a little money every April 15th.
Damn straight.
Now, I, like many Americans, file quarterly.
I don't have anything withheld.
I'm my own enterprise, so I have to pay my own taxes.
And if you do, you understand you have a little bit more awareness and emotion attached to the whole tax code than if you have your income taxes withheld.
But they have to write that check four times a year and to whatever state and city, if they have taxes, no longer the place applicable for me.
But in New York, it was a state, federal, and state, federal, and city when I lived in New York.
So now I try to see to it that I owe a little bit every April 15th.
Harry Reid with a press conference, just Durbin up there, they clearly now have, the polling data has to show them on the winning side of this.
GOP has made the decision to shut down the government.
And of course, the willing accomplices in the press are on their side.
Remember, the only reason we're here is because these guys did not do a budget.
They didn't do a budget for this year in 2010.
They purposely avoided doing a budget because it was an election year and they did not want to further alienate voters any more than they already were by being crystal clear about what their spending plans were.
GOP has made the decision to shut down the government.
Boehner does not want to shut down the government.
That's the dirty little secret here.
He's petrified of shutting down the government.
That also could be a factor in these guys' full court press here.
Durbin and Reed now claiming that there's definitely going to be a shutdown could be a ruse to panic Boehner because Boehner went out.
He basically went out and admitted that there wasn't going to be a shutdown.
The Republicans weren't going to do it.
And still he's demanding all these things.
It's kind of like showing up at the 7-Eleven saying you're going to rob the place.
You call him up.
Okay, I'm coming in and I'm going to rob you.
I'll be there in 10 minutes.
Show up with an unloaded gun is sort of the approach here to claiming we don't want to shut down.
We don't want to shut down, but we're going to really go to the mat here over this $30 billion spread in the differences that we have.
You probably heard that a lifelong friend of Mr. Obama has been arrested for soliciting prostitution in Hawaii.
Now, none of the reports have mentioned from which sex Obama's friend solicited sex from a prostitute, the gentleman in question, whose name is Titcombe or Titcomb.
I don't know how he pronounces it, T-I-T-C-O-M-B.
I've heard it pronounced in another way, Titkum, Titcomb, Titcomb.
It has multiple pronunciations, all dependent on how the owner of the name chooses to pronounce it.
But he has been, Mr. Titcombe has been one of Obama's favorite golf buddies.
And this guy obviously knows about teeing off.
They've been playing golf together since they went to school together in Hawaii.
Now, Trump is out there claiming that nobody knows anything about Obama's past life.
This Titcom guy does.
Now we've got a character witness.
We've got somebody, this Titkum guy who's been arrested for soliciting prostitution who knows Obama well.
By the way, Trump, I know some of you people in this audience don't like Trump, but he went to the Today Show today and he dropped a stink bomb on poor old Meredith Vieira.
She didn't know what to do with this.
This was just amazing.
We've got the audio.
During a discussion about Obama's birth certificate, Meredith Vieira said, in the state of Hawaii, they say they have seen this document, that he was born in the United States.
That's good enough for them.
A birth certificate is not even close.
A certificate of live birth is not even signed by anybody.
I saw his.
I read it very carefully.
Doesn't have a serial number.
It doesn't have a signature.
He spent $2 million in legal fees trying to get away from this issue.
And if he weren't lying, why wouldn't he just solve it?
I wish he would.
Because if he doesn't, it's one of the greatest scams in the history of politics and in the history, period.
That's true.
If Obama was not born here, this is a huge scam.
One, not just in politics, but one of the greatest scams ever.
Meredith Vieira, by the way, leaving NBC.
She's leaving the Today Show, and she might be leaving Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
She hosts that, the game show.
She came back at Trump and she said, You have people, you have people in Hawaii searching this?
They cannot believe what they're finding.
I would like to have him show his birth certificate.
Can I be honest with you?
I hope he can.
Because if he can't, if he can't, and if he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility, I'm not saying it happened, I'm saying it's a real possibility, much greater than I thought two or three weeks ago, then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.
And beyond.
You should have seen Meredith Vieira.
She doesn't know what to do with this.
You know, she's clearly, she's from the state-controlled media that there's no question here.
He's born in Hawaii.
She never has seen proof.
See, like everybody else, she's not seen proof.
She just knows that everybody else in her circle knows he was born in Hawaii.
And here comes this guy, Trump, who has his own NBC show.
They've got to be very careful here.
What's Trump's show?
You're fired?
What is it?
A celebrity apprentice.
So here he is.
I mean, as off the reservation as a state-controlled media apparatchik can possibly witness, she finally said, you've criticized Obama quite a bit in this interview and in the past.
What do you think he's done well?
I always used to get this question.
You know, when I deigned to go on these shows, is there anything nice in Kinkay?
No, no, no, mommy.
Wait, is there anything he's accomplished?
Is there not one thing he's done?
Always got a question like that.
Here's what Trump said.
Get elected.
I think he did a great job when he ran for office.
If I had my choice of having Obama do great as a president and do a really great job for this country and not running, as opposed to running and doing, I'd prefer that he did a great job.
I love this country, but this country is going to hell.
I would run a great, great country.
This country will be great again.
It is not great right now.
We have huge deficits.
We have huge unemployment.
We have huge problems.
And we're not respected.
We're not respected in the world.
The world laughs at us.
They won't be laughing if I'm president.
This is, he's tackling this birth thing head on.
I mean, head on.
And they can't say that Trump is part of the Tea Party.
He's not there.
I mean, he's a marginal Republican in terms of the way people classify.
But I mean, nobody, nobody is out there tackling this the way he is.
Nobody's out there.
And I actually think, by the way, that Trump is providing a blueprint here.
The way to beat Obama 2012 is to just go at him.
Stop this.
You know, everybody lives in this media-created fantasy that the guy's unbeatable and he's the greatest orator in the world.
You get him away from the prompter.
I'm serious.
And he's lost.
He's a gaffe machine.
He and Biden are in the same class, and it doesn't take long to call a roll.
There's a mythology that has been created about Obama that unnecessarily makes people afraid.
And Trump is illustrating the way to do this.
And Paul Ryan's budget is just you just go right after him.
You just go right after him instead of pussyfooting around, worrying about what the independents are going to say or worried about what the people that pay attention to politics two years two days a year are going to say.
Just go after it.
Last night, while appearing with the Reverend Sharpton in New York, Obama said that he stood by his record the past two years.
Said he is proud of what he's accomplished.
Well, what is that?
What has he accomplished?
That's not an achievement.
That is an albatross.
Obamacare?
What has he accomplished as president, except ruining the economy?
Is that what he's proud of?
And the scary thing is.
It very well might be back after this.
We got so much today, folks.
Chris Christie has said the New Jersey teachers' unions are a bunch of political thugs.
The leaders.
The school teachers are great people.
But the union leaders are a bunch of thugs.
And Muammar Gaddafi.
Muamar Gaddafi has written an open letter to Obama.
I am going to get into detail.
Obama insulting this guy who gets eight miles a gallon in his SUV at this thing yesterday, Mobam.
So maybe you need a trade-in.
That will not stand.
That needs to be exploited big time.
I'm going to show the way on that.
We'll get to that as the program unfolds.
But this thing, and in Mexico, I don't know if you've seen this or not, thousands of people are protesting in Mexico.
According to the AP, they are protesting against the government crackdown on the drug cartels.
The protesters in Mexico claim that all the violence and the mayhem and the killing is resulting from the government trying to hold the drug cartel to account.
I kid you not.
They're blaming the government's crackdown, trying to maintain the law as the reason for the violence.
That's scary stuff, too, because that's the people.
But back to Qaddafi and Trump.
Maybe Trump knows something more than we do.
Qaddafi has an open letter to Obama.
I have a copy of it here, my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
And he keeps calling Obama his son.
Now, we don't know where Gaddafi was born.
We've not seen his birth certificate.
And here you have Qaddafi.
In fact, in his letter to Obama, Qaddafi calls him our dear son, Excellency Baraka Hussein Abu Aouuma, which apparently is the full-fledged Muslim pronunciation or variation of Barack Hussein Obama.
Our dear son, Excellency Baraka Hussein Abuama.
Maybe we should start calling him that out of respect.
I mean, here's the guy.
Obama is bombing this guy.
Obama is sending NATO in to help the rebels are trying to bomb this guy, and Qaddafi is sending letters to Obama, our son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Uama.
Maybe, you know, the way I'm going to read this letter, it looks to me like Qaddafi fully understands that all this is, is an effort to get his son re-elected.
And so he's willing for Libya to be bombed.
He understands that the whole purpose of this is for his son, Baraka Hussein Abu Uama, to be re-elected.
He says, we have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you.
Despite all of this, Baraka, you will always remain our son, whatever happened.
Now, remember, Qaddafi has long believed that Obama is a Muslim, and he's gone out there and he said so.
We still pray that you continue to be president of the USA.
We endeavor and hope that you will gain victory in a new election campaign.
So Qaddafi understands that he's being bombed by his son so his son can win re-election.
He's happy with it.
This is the most unreal I've ever seen.
On the cutting edge, Rushlimbos serving humanity.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Muamar Qaddafi in his letter to dear son, Excellency Baraka Hussein Abu Uama.
We still pray that you continue to be president of the USA.
We endeavor and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaign, which shows that even Qaddafi realizes that all of this is about getting his son, Mr. Abu Uama, re-elected.
Now, the question is, will this endorsement put Obama over the top?
What would you expect from a supporter financially and morally of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, a mentor, after all, to Obama's spiritual mentor, to be Jeremiah Wright?
Gaddafi further said, you are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action.
I am sure that you are able to shoulder the responsibility for that.
Now, this tells me that Mr. Gaddafi does not know his son very well at all, because Mr. Abu Umama has never admitted a mistake, let alone shouldered the responsibility for one.
But still, what I take away from this is Gaddafi is getting the ever-living kicked out of his country.
And he writes in a letter to Obama, his son, saying, we understand why you got to do this.
And we hope you win your reelection.
All right, moving on to Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, yesterday at the Gamisa Technology Corporation, Obama spoke.
And during the Q ⁇ A, an unidentified guy said, you're talking about the rise of gas prices.
Oh, before that, let me grab this AP story.
This outrageous and hilarious at the same time.
Shoppers shrugged off higher gas prices and cool temperatures to give retailers a surprisingly strong march.
Did you know that?
Did you know that you just shrugged off high gas prices?
Did you pull into Pump Brian's in the new gas price?
Eh, no big deal.
I got to go to the mall.
Would you ever, gas prices are nearing the $4 tipping point nationwide?
They're already at $4 in certain states a gallon.
Would you ever see a story like this with a Republican president?
Shoppers shrugged off higher gas prices?
Well, the fact is, shoppers, voters are not shrugging off higher gas prices.
This guy at Obama's town hall yesterday in Pennsylvania said to him, you were talking about the rise of gas prices.
I know back in the 70s, they were going from our license plates, odd to evens, days we could get gas.
I know we're not at that stage right now, but they did lower the prices after that.
Is there a chance of the gasoline price being lowered again?
Now listen to Obama's answer.
I'm just going to be honest with you.
There's not much we can do next week or two weeks from now.
But if you're getting eight miles a gallon, you may want to think about a trade-in.
You can get a great deal.
I promise you, GM or Ford or Chrysler, they're going to be happy to give you a deal on something that gets you better gas mileage.
Gas prices, they're going to still fluctuate until we can start making these broader changes, and that's going to take a couple of years to have serious effect.
He's talking about his green energy programs, and they will not be anything productive in two years or 30 years.
Oil is it.
But that's not my point.
Here is a guy who has an SUV who's asking about gasoline prices.
And Obama says, hey, you know what?
Eight miles a gallon, you better go get a trade-in.
This is a total disconnect.
It's as disconnected as it gets.
So may I have the attention of all Americans, all of you who make a living using your trucks, pickup trucks, vans, four-wheel-drive vehicles, all of you painters, you construction workers, deliverymen, cab drivers, even soccer moms.
Those of you who depend on large vehicles for your business or for the safety of your family, your president has just told you to trade it in for some electric job that his company happens to make.
Trade in your vehicles.
Go out and buy a subcompact.
See, that's how this works for you.
Problem solved, according to Barack Obama.
I want to go back to 2005, 2006.
Gas price getting up to four bucks.
George Bush gets a question about it.
Why don't you go trade in that gas guzzler of yours, pal?
What would the news reports be?
They would certainly be focused on the insensitivity of Bush.
Well, he doesn't care what gas costs because he doesn't have to buy it.
And he's in a limousine that only gets eight miles to the gallon.
Well, so is Obama.
Obama's limo gets eight miles to the gallon.
His fleet of security vehicles, suburbans, they're not going to switch out.
Classic illustration here of how statists live and work and you don't get to play in their league.
So you just got to go trade in your car.
You got to go get a subcompact.
You got to go out and get, if you want to spend less on gasoline, we're not going to drill.
We're not going to increase our own supply of oil.
No, we're going to hold out for a worthless so-called green energy solution that does not exist and won't exist for decades.
And don't doubt me.
He's not going to try to lower prices.
He's not going to try to lower taxes.
He is not going to lower the corporate tax rate.
He's not going to take any action that will make the cost of living less because he doesn't want to.
What we need to do is trade in Obama.
We bought the wrong president.
You have to go trade in your car.
You didn't get an Obama-approved vehicle.
Oh, let's not forget about students and those making at or near the minimum wage.
If you don't have a high-mile car, you're screwed.
The president doesn't care.
You got that?
Your gas prices are not going down.
He doesn't care.
He's on record as saying he didn't mind a $4 a gallon national gasoline price.
He was a little upset at how fast it got there, but the overall effect of the price didn't bother him at all.
So what are you going to do now?
You show up, you tell the president of your concern, eight miles to the gallon, and he tells you to go trade in your vehicle.
Well, you might not be able to afford to drive to the polls in 2012 and vote for the idiot who loves high gas prices.
That's what you should tell him.
Now, this is from a guy who says he remembers, we've got the, I think we've got to, yeah, grab.
Let me see if I have the, I got these soundbites all out of order.
Yeah, I don't know.
Is it 11 where he talks about, no.
No, I need the one where he talks about where he pumped gas when he was young.
And I've got these, everything came in in a Kakamavi order today, so I don't can't find it real quick.
But he said he remembers what it's like to pump gas.
And that's when gasoline was cheap.
He remembers what it was like to buy gas before he became president, when Bush was president.
Gasoline has doubled in price since Obama hit town.
He says buy a new car.
The federal deficit has ballooned since Obama hit town.
He tells you to trade in your car.
He says, Sarah Palin is an embarrassment.
Yeah, Sarah Palin is an embarrassment.
Meanwhile, Obama is destroying the little guy.
High gasoline prices, high food prices, inflation on the way.
Try that one out, seasoned citizens.
All of you on fixed incomes, gas prices are not going down.
Food prices won't either.
Welcome to Obamaville.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have...
Oh, grab audio soundbite 34.
This is Boehner.
This is this morning in Washington.
He held his weekly presser.
And during the Q ⁇ A, a reporter said, Speaker Boehner, last night, Leader Reed said he was optimistic that you'd reach a deal.
Then this morning seemed to indicate that you moved further apart, that the discussions had deteriorated.
You agree with that?
What seems to have happened over the last 12 hours?
We made some progress last night, or at least I thought we did.
But, you know, when I see what the White House has to offer today, it's really just more of the same.
We're going to have real spending cuts.
And I don't know what some people don't understand about this.
There is no agreement on a number.
In fact, I think we were closer to a number last night than we are this morning.
Okay, both sides agree they were closer last night than they are on a number this morning.
You and I both know that the numbers on both sides are a joke.
I know you have to start somewhere.
Folks, $40 billion, $70 billion.
We're talking about interest that accumulates has to be paid over a couple of days here.
Now, when you start talking trillions, as Paul Ryan is talking, now you're talking real dollars.
And we've got ourselves hemmed in on a timeline.
Got to get this done by midnight tomorrow.
Why?
Why is it, why are we looking at a timeline?
I really like this point.
Why are we getting hemmed in and having all this pressure brought down on us by the timeline?
Why shouldn't the focus be on the size?
I know it is partially, but as long as we're doing this, no, I know everybody on our side is afraid of budget shutdown.
I just, our government shutdown.
I'm not in their business, so it's easy to look from afar here and say you'd do it differently if you were in their shoes.
But I just, I'm not governed by the fear.
Fear kills.
It just, it just, oh, CNN.
Countdown clock, by the way, 35 hours and 15 minutes.
Well, 12 minutes now.
And they are reporting that the first furlough notices have gone out to congressional staffers so that they can prepare for a shutdown.
My heart breaks.
Let's get the Strativariuses out and let's start singing the tunes that bring on tears.
How do they prepare for a snow day?
Do they send out furlough notices for the three-day weekend, which is essentially what is going to end up being?
Let's go to Zanesville, Ohio as we start on the phones with Joe.
Thank you for calling, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
How you doing, Rush?
Good.
I just came up with the idea that you hit it on the head when you said, let's not trade in our cars.
Let's go one step further.
Let's not trade in our cars.
Let's not trade in our lives.
Let's trade in Obama.
Trade in Obama.
Absolutely right.
I'm glad you like that.
I come from a state.
Actually, there's a picture in the New York Times of Kasich being in a little ice cream restaurant in Zanesville, Ohio.
And that was the one where I work.
I'm actually a general manager there.
And my boss is not actually a conservative, but he was in Kasich's boat, and so was I.
Now, the thing I come up with is I'm from a state that uses and harvests natural gas, and we're huge on coal, and all I hear is we can't drill for it, we can't mine for it, and Obama says that you can't, you know, go trade in your car.
Well, I don't want to trade in my car, and he says he can't do anything about it.
Well, you can't tell me that if he said, okay, go ahead and drill, that the price of gasoline wouldn't plummet.
No, it would.
You have to understand.
Look, it's very simple.
You've laid it out pretty well here.
You got a guy who got coal?
Nope, not going to use coal.
Gasoline, natural gas.
Nope, not going to do that.
Too dangerous, could destroy the planet, blah, blah.
What do you have?
What does all this add up?
You've got a guy and a regime full of people who agree with him that their objective is now is to preside over the decline of this country to that of a European-type socialist state.
That's their objective.
There's a war on prosperity.
It's happening every day, and it's in their policies.
There's a war on prosperity.
There's no doubt about it.
We've got two and a half years under our belt of regime policies, and we see the results of regime policies.
Now, anybody who really cared about reversing this would see that after two and a half years, their policies aren't working.
They would engage to improve them, maybe alter them a bit so that you get a different result.
No, we're doubling down on the same stuff that got us where we are.
So you go to a windmill company, a guy asks you about eight miles to the gallon in his SUV, and the president says, trade it in.
And he goes to Sharpton's group, says, yeah, look, you can count on me.
I know I would always like to pump gas.
When did he ever pump gas?
We've been told in his books that the only job he's ever had working one day at a Baskin-Robbins, now we do know that he worked, felt like he was across enemy lines working in some law firm for a while.
But he worked at a Baskin-Robbins, which is why he claimed he hated ice cream, which turned out to be another lie.
He loves ice cream.
Now, don't you think that if Obama pumped gas, that we would have some of the people he worked for and worked with coming forward to brag about it?
Oh, yeah, I pumped gas with Obama.
I mean, this Titkim guy out there soliciting prostitutes, he's a good buddy of Obama.
Maybe this guy can recall the days that Obama pumped gas.
This is, I wouldn't be surprised if this is another made-up story, just on the fly.
No, it wasn't on a prompter, so all bets are off.
Hell yeah, I pumped gas, like the one about him being conceived by his parents while they were in Selma.
He actually said that.
He said that his parents got the idea.
He said that the idea of all that when his parents were in Selma, he said it when he was in Selma, talking about the movement.
We borrow $4 billion a day from China, and we are arguing over the difference between $30 and $70 billion in cuts here and whether or not we are going to shut down the government over this.
At any rate, here's what he said.
This Obama last night.
Oh, he said at a time when the economy is still coming out of an extraordinarily deep recession, it would be inexcusable, given the relatively narrow differences when it comes to numbers between the two parties, that we can't get this done.
He said that last night at the White House.
So I guess he wants to own the budget negotiations now, like owning the mob in Egypt.
But he goes away all day, comes back late at night, then summons everybody to the White House for a meeting to make it look like that he is intimately involved in all of this.
But note the priority.
The priority was the re-election campaign in shoring up what apparently is a weakening support in the black community.
And we're back, but sadly, just long enough here to prep you for our next exciting hour of broadcast excellence.
As I say, there's a lot of exciting stuff to do here.
You realize the media is in a panic over a lot of things.
They're so looking forward to obsessing over our slaveholding past.