Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
The views expressed by the host on this program make more sense than anything anybody else happens to be saying.
And the reason is I'm right.
Documented to be almost always right, 99.6% of the time.
I love listening to myself, just as you do.
Especially when I'm right, which is most of the time.
Great to have you here, folks.
Broadcast excellence all yours.
Snerdley, did you watch the debate last night?
You did watch the debate last night.
Well you cashed out on the first one.
You didn't watch it.
Great to have you here, folks.
Here's the telephone number if you want to be on the program 800 282-2882 and the email address, Lrushball at EIBNet.com.
It was another good debate on balance.
I mean, we can nitpick from uh candidate to candidate to candidate, but uh the whole even Ron, what's his name?
Uh even Ron Paul didn't sound kooky all night.
He had his moments.
But it was a it was a good night for conservatism in terms of the um cogent way it was expressed.
Michelle Bachman did really well last night, I thought, uh, introducing herself and announcing her uh campaign.
The meet the media today, the media is starting last night, even today, they're all upset that the Republicans weren't attacking each other.
It really, and they're really jumping all over Pollente.
They're calling Pollenty a wimp.
Now, you know why they're mad at Pelenties because he mentioned my name.
Pollenty's the one candidate mentioned my name last night.
He happened to mention that he comes from a family of Reagan Democrats, union members, who now listen to me.
So that did not stand him in good stead with the media, and then you know he came up with the term Obamni care to describe Mitt Romney and his health care plan in Minnesota, Massachusetts being identical to Obama's, and they gave Polletti a chance to ram that home, and he wouldn't do it last night.
He chose the polite route, and the media is all upset because he didn't go cutthroat on them out there.
Uh backed off and said upset that all these guys did was attack Obama.
Now, folks, it's 17 months out, and they are going to attack themselves at some point.
That's gonna happen when we get further into the debate process.
The Republicans are gonna start going after each other.
But right now, Obama is the focal point.
Obama is the opposition.
And I forget uh isn't this the civility that everybody claims they wanted?
It's an excellent point.
Everybody's been demanding civility.
Uh and so the Republicans epitomized it last night in the media all upset.
They're upset because the attacks on Obama were effective.
I mean, this regime's got nothing to defend.
The regime cannot say, give us four more years to do what we've done.
There's nothing they've done that they can say, give us four more years to do more of.
Nobody really wants it.
And the media hates civility at Republican debates.
John King was the moderator last night, and he had some technique that I found uh found a bit curious.
I have to be very careful here when I utter media criticism.
Of course, everybody hears it, reacts to it.
And I have to be very measured and civil, if you will, in my uh in my tone here, but man, you heard some of these questions.
Herman Kane, he's a deep dish or thin crust.
And I'm sitting there scratching my head.
We're in the midst here of a policy debate.
Each participant gets 30 seconds only to answer every question and get peppered with that kind of stuff.
And I don't remember Obama being hit with those kind of questions.
If Obama had been there, would John King have said lobster or Kobe Beef?
Dom Perignon or Chris Dow.
Uh Bill Ayers or Reverend Wright, secure borders or murders, rapes, and kidnappings.
What's your choice, Mr. President?
Uh Harvard or Alinsky, you public or private sector.
I mean, this is it was it was uh you know, socialism or capitalism.
Uh the the I think the effort to bring the audience questions into a debate like this um is is programming technique, sturdley.
It is a desire to uh to to have the uh audience connect and be part of the program rather than just uh participants.
Some of their questions were good, some of their questions were better and more pointed than some of the media questions.
The media questions that it just uh Catherine and I were watching this last night, and I looked at it and I said, Yep, there you go.
Typical narrative question, template question.
You can guarantee yourself that two topics are gonna come up: abortion and gay marriage.
And you could just see when both those topics came up, John King came alive.
I mean, the the uh the top door to the casket that he was in came alive, and he popped out of there, and he was animated.
Whoa, got excited.
Now this is a chance.
I'm gonna really screw these guys now.
We're gonna get them on gay marriage or we're gonna get them on abortion.
It's just um standard operating procedure.
And of course, everybody handled these questions like a champ.
Didn't give them anything.
And it was uh I I think all in all for the second debate, uh it was it was uh it made people watching who are conservative feel for the most part optimistic.
Yeah, you can go candidate by candidate if you wanted to today, we could, and here's what I didn't like, here's what could have been done better.
Uh and we can find the uh we can find the problems.
But who was I think it was Mitt Romney last night who said anybody on that stage would be a better president and Barack Obama, and anybody on that stage would be a better vice president than Joe Bight Me.
Another John King question.
Anthony Wiener, hot dog or wiener.
Anthony Wiener, but you know the Democrats cannot wait.
There's a story here, I think it's politico.
They've got this guy going away to sex rehab for maybe years.
The story says it may take years for Wiener to recover and to get proper treatment for whatever it is for his narcissism.
They are really upset, by the way.
Um forget who it is here.
Some Howard Feynman lets the cat out of the bag.
He has sullied the house, Jim.
Go in there and take those pictures in the House gym, which I think is in the basement of the Rayburn office building.
Uh that that again, another final straw.
But they've got they got Wiener now off in some uh rehab center that they're speculating might take years.
Now, as to the campaign, and just to illustrate for you, you are on the cutting edge.
If you listen to this program, grab some bite number one, Mike.
Let's go back, listen to me.
This program May 11th of this year.
This is just one of many occasions on which I said the following.
Do we really want to change horses in the Middle Stream?
That really is going to be the campaign.
Do you really want to turn it back to the people who ran the car in the ditch?
That's what this campaign is going to be.
The regime cannot promote itself.
The regime cannot say four more years of X, you like 9% unemployment, how about 11?
There's nothing.
There's not one thing the regime has done that they can promise to do more of than anybody wants.
It's the exact opposite.
So what their campaign is going to be, and I told you this, when they got into Washington, they discovered it was far worse than they even knew that Bush and Cheney lied to them, did not tell them how bad the economic circumstances were.
Oh my gosh, it's worse.
Our programs are working, but it's going to take a lot longer than we thought to bring us out of this mess.
And we're just now starting to see some turnaround, which we're not, but this is what they're saying.
And and then say you really can't change horses in the middle of the stream.
Now we can't, we can't turn this over to the people who ran the car in a ditch.
Last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper 19, after the debate, they talked to the former press secretary Robert Gibbs about Obama's success and the campaign, and you listen and you tell me if I don't know these people.
The policies that were espoused in 2007 and 2008 that got us into the economic mess that we're trying to get ourselves out of tonight.
That's the economic platform that was introduced by these candidates.
We have to understand what got us into this mess, and we have to make sure that we don't hire somebody to repeat those same mistakes.
If the Bush tax cuts were great for economic policy, why did we lose three and a half million jobs?
Stop the tape a second.
Stop the tape.
Stop the tape.
Your boss Just extended those Bush tax cuts last December, Gibbs, on the basis that he needed to prolong an economic recovery.
We didn't lose three and a half million jobs during the Bush years.
To the contrary, millions of new jobs were created.
We didn't lose three and a half million jobs.
So here's Gibnot by fiat by rote, ripping into the Bush tax cuts, which happened in 2001 and 2003, by the way.
They're that old.
Obama renewed them last December in the lame duck session.
But he just extended what already on the books.
No new tax rates were reduced.
There weren't any new cuts.
There's no substantive change in policy or impact.
And Obama did not raise the taxes and end the Bush tax rates because that would have choked off economic recovery.
He knew it.
So yet here's Gibbs nevertheless ripping the very tax cuts that Obama extended and then lying about all the jobs that were lost because of the Bush tax cuts.
So he's lying through his teeth on purpose, knows he's not going to be challenged by Anderson Cooper 19, setting the stage here exactly as I said.
Well, it's so bad it was bad.
These guys turned it really with the economy was so bad we didn't know how bad it was.
We don't want to turn it back over to the same people who gave us this problem, blah, blah, blah.
Here's the rest of the bite.
In 2006, 2007, and 2000.
It took us a while to get into this mess.
And it's going to take us a while to get out.
See, you didn't ask the question.
Do you blame Bush and the Republicans more than you blame Obama and the Democrats?
The answer was you blame Bush.
A series of decisions that got us into the mess is not a series of decisions we ought to make to get us out of.
So what happened the past two and a half years didn't happen.
There hasn't been, there have not been two and a half years of the Obama regime.
We may as well be looking at the year 2008, running the presidential campaign all over again.
Not one thing that's happened since is even being discussed.
Of course, you know and I know that the policies that this regime is implemented have worsened the U.S. economy, done so purposefully, we all believe, made it more and more difficult, much more difficult for the country to rebound.
Obstacles have been placed in the way of entrepreneurs and others.
But we can't deal with the truth here.
We've got to construct falsehoods and live off of them.
Which this is this is the first stage of the Obama re-election campaign.
We're in a mess, the Republicans got us there.
We need Obama to fix it.
We need Obama's policies.
There really haven't even been any Obama policies yet, is what Gibbs wants you to believe.
Now a lot of people, this next sound bite, a lot of people reacting to this.
The Heritage Foundation on their morning blog, uh, The Corner, long piece about this.
Any number of places I've seen, people are having visceral reactions to this next bite.
This was yesterday in Durham, North Carolina.
Obama was there at some corporation talking about job growth and his policies and so forth.
And he had Jeff Immelt of NBC GE and others from his uh private sector jobs commission.
These guys are there to advise Obama on private sector job creation.
And in the midst of this appearance is a QA with an unidentified member of Obama's council, his jobs and competitive council.
And one of the members asked Obama a question.
I'm sure that when you implemented the Recovery Act, your staff briefed you on many of the challenges of the permitting process and the impact on putting Americans back to work.
And that's exactly what we see in American business as well.
Shovel ready was not as uh shovel ready as we expected.
And they laughed about it.
We cut it, but there's laughter.
Imelt and these members of the committee start laughing at this.
Shovel Ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.
This is from the one.
This is from the Messiah.
This is from the expert.
This is the man who gave us almost 800 billion dollars to pay people to do these shovel ready jobs.
There weren't any shovel ready jobs.
The council member admits it.
Oh, yeah, well, shovel ready was not as shovel ready as we expect.
He's laughing about it.
After passing himself off as the lone expert here, he's the guy that's got the only way out of this mess.
He's admitting that...
He didn't know what he was talking about, and now he's laughing about it, as did all the other members of the commission.
I got to take a brief time out.
Our first of many obscene profit breaks today here at the Rush Limbaugh program.
We'll be back.
He spoke to a half empty crowd or arena in Miami last night and got heckled by a bunch of AIDS activists to boot.
But I mean, really, the media is treating this shovel ready thing as a as a joke.
I don't I don't think people losing their jobs and losing their lives and losing their homes and I don't think it's this is not a joke.
What's happening to people?
We all know people to whom this has happened.
We all know people to whom this is happening.
And we know that people are doing their level best to come out of their circumstances, and they've got this giant obstacle in the way.
And it's this president's policies, his way of looking at the world.
Socialism, Marxism, what have you.
And the government was supposed to be the big savior here.
The government, Keynesian economics, massive federal spending, job creation.
You can't fill a swimming pool.
You can't expand the amount of water in a swimming pool by taking one buckets of water from one end and putting it in the other end of the pool.
You're not changing the amount of water.
You're just redistributing where the water is.
And in a swimming pool, it's all going to level out anyway and be where it was before you started.
It's the same thing with the U.S. economy.
You can't take dollars from one area and move them to another area and claim you're growing the economy.
You can't take money from people who are earning it and producing, giving it to people who are not, and claiming that you're engaged in social justice.
You can't take money from people who have it, give it to people who don't, claim you're growing the economy.
It's not how economic growth takes place.
The whole thing was flawed.
And now it turns out it was just a joke.
Shovel ready wasn't as shovel ready as we expected.
The joke is that the money was never intended to go to shovel ready jobs.
It was it was intended and went to state and local union employees in a money laundering operation of money stayed at the Democrat Party.
Okay, shovel ready.
Shovel ready was not as shovel ready as we thought.
Ha ha!
Everybody laughs.
Now let me give you some others.
Affordable health care is not as affordable as we thought.
That statement will be made by Obama down the road.
He's just now figuring out that there weren't any shovel ready jobs.
His health care act is called the Affordable Health Care Act.
Guess what?
The affordable health care was not as affordable as we thought.
And there's all this talk about fiscal responsibility.
Guess what?
Fiscal responsibility was not as responsible as we thought.
Now who's to blame?
The environmentalists and the unions.
That's why a lot of this stuff is not working.
Obama's constituents.
Those are the people who stand in the way with permits and red tape and prevent any kind of project from moving forward.
Obama is new jobs push is, and this is along with Jeff Immelt, the head of Obama's jobs council, Larry Summers, is a push for a new round of stimulus.
That's what was going on.
They want more stimulus.
They want Stimulus 3.
This whole notion, well, a shovel-ready wasn't quite as shovel-ready as we thought.
They want another round.
That's what's being set up here.
Another stimulus.
They'll say it didn't work the first time, it was too small.
The permits and regulations got in the way.
This time we'll do it the right way.
We'll do the stimulus the right way.
Yeah, club give mo.
Not as closable as we thought.
Obama will say down the road.
We are back on the cutting edge El Rushbo, talent on the loan from God as the big voice on the right.
What exactly did George W. Bush do to get us into this recession?
It's just stated and accepted that Bush gave us the recession that we're in.
Obama inherited a recession.
And when he got into office, he found that it was much worse than he had been told, much worse than he realized, much worse than he imagined.
So what exactly did George W. Bush do to get us into this recession?
Fight two wars?
Well, we were already fighting two wars, and we still are.
So fighting two wars, is that what he did?
How about four wars?
George Bush had us in two, now we are in four wars.
Did George W. Bush cut taxes?
Is that what gave us the recession?
Well, Obama extended the Bush tax cuts last December.
So what exactly has Bush done, or what did he do that created this recession?
Did Bush increase federal spending too much?
He did spend a lot, but whatever Bush spent, Obama's quadrupled it.
If what Bush did was so terrible, this is my point.
If what Bush did was so terrible, and if what Bush did gave us this recession, how come Obama doubling down on what Bush did is somehow going to get us out of it?
Now we all know why we're in this circumstance.
It's in that book.
And you didn't even need to read the book, folks.
I mean, you should.
Book that I have told you about reckless endangerment, how outsized ambition, greed, and corruption led to economic Armageddon.
It's the housing crisis that led us here, the subprime situation in all of the derivatives and ancillaries that flow from it, Fannie Mae, countrywide, Angelo Mozilla, all of this is traceable to that.
And that's traceable to Bill Clinton, as this book makes clear.
And as we now know, and it's also in this book, it was the Bush administration which tried to regulate this out of existence, meaning the problem.
Bush tried to stop this.
And Barney Frank and the Democrats basically ate those regulators up, chewed them up, and spat them out in the midst of hearings.
We know what led to this recession.
It was nationwide lending of money to people that had no way of paying back their loans.
And the big question that everybody's always asked me, well, Russia, how did they make money then?
How in the world did all these banks make money lending money, giving mortgages to people who couldn't pay it back?
It's an excellent question.
And I, of course, L. Rushbow have the answer.
The banks were up against it.
The banks have been accused of predatory lending, and in some instances, the Wall Street bankers, very powerful Wall Street bankers, were indeed in bed with Jim Johnson over at uh at Fannie Mae and with Clinton and then with Obama.
Crony capitalism, what have you?
But Janet Reno's on record is threatening banks with massive investigations if they did not continue to make these loans under the Community Redevelopment Act or whatever it was called.
But the question is, okay, see, loaning money to people can't pay it back.
Where in the world is the profit in that?
If nobody can service the loan, they can't pay it back.
How do you make any money?
Good question.
Here's how it happened.
All of these mortgages which were required to be made were sitting there as individual mortgages worthless.
So what happened, as simply as I can explain this, is that in the in the public sector, and then there was a first instance of this in the private sector.
I forget the name of the bank, the book mentions it.
These mortgages were pooled.
All of these disparate mortgages were pooled into one bundle or a series of large bundles.
A security, a mortgage-backed security of, say 13 million dollars.
Okay, but I still understand, Rush, if you got 130 million dollars total mortgages and nobody can pay them back, how do you make any money?
Well, you sell the mortgages to Fannie Mae, which is a government sponsored enterprise, which is ostensibly a private sector enterprise with government ties.
But the way it worked was this.
When the government's involved, nobody loses money.
The government's good for anything.
If somebody blows up the government bail them out.
Fannie May will take care of it, and that's what happened.
They package these from the standpoint of the bankers, they knew that they were sitting on worthless paper, all of these loans and mortgages.
So they try to come up with ways to make it profitable.
So they package these bundles, these pools of mortgages, call it a security, and then they sell this to the unwitting.
Just like the unwitting buy lemons, the unwitting buy all kinds of stupid stuff.
You go out and you package these mortgages and you promise this giant income stream.
Say, by the way, it's backed by the federal government, no sweat here.
And you pass it on to investors.
And then each series of investors at some point realizes they've bought a bunch of goods, worthless paper.
And at each stage, the latest crew of investors realizing they've been taken, tries to come up with a new way of monetizing these things so that they're worth something, and they can sell them to somebody else.
And that kept happening until everybody knew what was going on, and there was no money there.
The only thing that could happen was constant continual bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
There never was any real income associated with these things.
Yet the people who pooled them and packaged them and sold them made out like bandits selling worthless paper.
The people at the tail end of this are the ones that got stung, just like the bondholders at Chrysler.
Got stung in the government takeover.
The bondholders at GM got stung in the government takeover.
They were the ones told they were greedy in wanting their money back.
So that's how people made money.
They didn't make money on the mortgages themselves.
They didn't make any money on people paying off the loans.
There was no income stream from all these people who were incapable of paying a loan because they were never qualified.
The income came from pooling or packaging, selling these mortgage-backed securities to the unwitting, who by the way never knew they were unwitting.
I mean, these are these were not doofuses.
These were these were equally smart people.
And at the end of the day, and all of this stuff, well, it's all backed by the government.
Eventually, this is all going to be made whole.
The government's behind it.
Magic words.
And if the government bails anybody out once, you figure it'll happen again.
Which is the problem with bailouts.
But then the government decided not to bail out Bear Stearns.
They decided to let Bear Stearns go belly up, and that is when abject panic set in.
Hello, TARP.
Hello money, to make all of this worth something because it was totally worthless.
The subprime, all of these packaged pools of mortgages were worthless from the get-go.
You had Democrat Party's social justice, social policy, the American dream being realized by more and more people, a Democrat Party getting credit for making homeownership possible.
You had racial tensions here by getting rid of the redlining practice and so forth.
It was all made to order for everything Democrats they could benefit having people in homes that could no longer or never pay for them.
Let it be known it was a Democrat Party that made that possible.
And then when, as it always does, in in anything like that, when there's no money in something, eventually the Madoff Ponzi Scheme is exposed.
Social Security Ponzi scheme is going to be exposed the same way.
Medicare Ponzi scheme is going to be exposed the same way.
At that point, what happened is that Hank Paulson and the boys said, you know what, I can't let my boys on Wall Street eat this.
So we're going to go in there and we'll make this massive claim for TARP money, $700 billion, and we'll say that we got to do this to save the entire financial system of the world, not just the country, but the world.
And we'll do this right during the presidential campaign.
And it worked well.
McCain suspends his campaign to deal with the crisis.
Obama takes over the meeting.
McCain effectively ends his chances along with ending his campaign.
The money comes forward.
Bush is involved too.
He's, you know, he's he's read the Riot Act.
He said, if you don't do this, I remember I had to go appear at a function, and there happened to be a couple U.S. senators there in the midst of all this.
And I uh I asked him, is this is this financial system really?
Oh, yeah, Russia, it's worse than even what you've heard.
It is really.
We had to do this TARP thing.
If we hadn't done this, I shut it right.
There might not be a U.S. financial system right now.
And I said, well, the only problem with that is they told us that, and they said we had 24 hours.
And it was voted down at first.
It took two, three weeks for the TARP thing to actually get funded and voted on and passed.
What how do we survive those two to three weeks?
Well, we survived because people knew the money would eventually be coming.
It was really bad out there, right?
When it wasn't.
Well, it was, but it wasn't.
It was, it was.
It was a scheme to make whole all these people who had acted under government orders to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back.
How do we how do we make them whole again?
Well, we'll just bail them out.
Federal prints and money.
Remember, up to this point, too, the Fed had already printed and lent two trillion dollars to others that at that time they wouldn't tell us to whom.
So tell me again what Bush did to cause this recession.
And that's the point of all this.
What did Bush do to cause the recession?
And it's all that's Gibbs' points, the Democrats' points, Obama's point.
Yeah, well, Democrats, the only ones that can save us.
Republicans drove the car in a ditch, a Bush recession.
Well, what exactly was the Bush recession?
What did he do to get us into this?
Fight two wars?
Fine.
We're fighting four now.
Cut taxes.
Well, Obama extended the tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts last December.
And Bush engaged in too much federal spending.
Well, yeah, and Obama's quadrupled it.
Whatever Bush did, Obama's doubled down and multiplied it three or four times, and yet Bush did all this.
Obama just doubling down on what he claims got us into the recession.
He tripled down on us, if you will.
In many ways, the housing collapse was a lot like the savings and loan crisis in the 80s.
People were making money on bad loans because they knew they had government as their ultimate backstop.
Until the guys at the very end of the trail.
And that's when it required when you couldn't find any more suckers to buy the bad paper.
Like a pyramid scheme, and you couldn't find any more suckers to buy the bad paper.
Hello, TARP.
Hello, government bailing everybody out.
That's what it was.
Under the guise of saving the U.S. financial system.
And what it was, I joked at the time that what Paulson was doing was making sure his Wall Street buddies held on to their homes in the Hamptons.
and I was closer to being right than I even knew at the time.
The End Mr. Snergley just asked me a question.
And it's a good question.
Snurdley wanted to know what would have happened if these bad loans had just been allowed to fail and people would have been evicted.
What would have happened?
Well, it would have been bad, but it wouldn't have caused anywhere near a financial crisis.
Wouldn't have been anything.
You could have all of those subprime mortgages could have just been left alone to fail as they were destined to because they were given to people who could not ever pay them back.
You would not have had a housing crisis.
Not a crisis.
You wouldn't have had anything like we've got now.
The reason, the reason that we've got this mess is not just because money was lent to people who couldn't pay it back.
It is because the people who were forced to make those loans came up with products to try to make their paper worth something.
Hence, like I said, the pooling of all those mortgages into what was called a mortgage-backed security.
You pool $130 million worth of mortgages into a single security and you run out, sell it, and you tell people, yeah, the income stream from this barrel, you could look you're going to be retire, uh is fit for uh set for the rest of your life.
Real estate never goes down, we're never going to lose value here and so forth.
And all of that, plus you've heard the term derivatives.
I mean, that that's that's above my pay grade to explain.
Uh, but the derivatives of the mortgage-backed security said that it was just another way to pass off the loss to somebody else to get somebody to buy your loss from you so that you're somewhat whole, if not fully whole, and you hoodwink whoever's buying it.
At the end of the trail, that final buyer realizes he's been had, that's when you go to TARP.
And that's when you go to the federal government, bail everybody out.
Jimmy Carter, same thing.
The savings and loan crisis.
Jimmy Carter extended federal deposit insurance on accounts from 40,000 to 100,000 to help the poor.
What happened then was that the quote unquote smart guys just exploited that and they bundled their shaky loans into 100,000 bundles in order to get the government protection.
But Carter's motivation was to make it easier for more people to get homeownership, just like the Community Redevelopment Act was.
I mean, that's the stated purpose.
Social justice, the American dream.
You know, it's it's hard to believe now, but there was a time in America where uh before Clinton and Carter buying mortgages used to be seen as the one of the safest investments a bank could make.
And the reason was to get a mortgage, you had a skin in a game.
You had a 20% of your own assets to put down minimum.
Or you could get a mortgage on a house, you had to have 20% of what you were going to borrow.
You had to stick it in yourself.
3.5%.
That's the point.
It's 0% now.
In some places, 3.5%.
You had FHA for a time.
You could get in at 5%, but now it's zero.
That's the whole subprime.
It was 0%.
The derivatives, what they were was a form of insurance to back up the worthlessness of the pool.
You were selling insurance on something that it was like.
It really was, although it was unknown at the time, it was like selling fire insurance when half the house is already burned to the ground and still flaming.
Banks did it out of desperation.
They were forced into this and they were doing whatever they could do, inventing all these products so that they wouldn't be the one to eat this.