Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Greetings, my friends.
I am Rush Limbaugh, changing the course of American history even as I speak.
Changing the course of American history because I speak.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
And you know the rule.
Well, you may not.
You might be new to the program today.
So I will take a brief moment here to explain how this works.
Monday through Thursday, the callers have to talk about subjects I'm interested in.
Snerdley knows those subjects because I tell him what the show prep is.
Plus, he knows me.
If I don't care about it, Snerdley, either politely or rudely, will tell you to call back on Friday.
That depends on you.
Because on Friday, you can talk about whatever you want.
We go to the phones.
The all-important content of the program is left to you.
That's a major, major career risk, a risk not taken by other media figures.
It's your chance to pretend that you're a talk show host and do the show the way you think it should be done.
Talk about things that you think need to be discussed.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushball at EIBnet.com.
And I love Open Line Friday.
You never know how it's going to go.
I don't know why Snerdley gets nervous about it.
I think it's almost like you could phone it in.
It's pretty much put whatever you get up there.
Well, I can imagine what comes in on Friday, but the point is we relax some of the standards.
And you're telling me you work harder screening calls on Friday than you do during Monday through Thursday?
Yeah, yesterday was an aberration.
Yesterday was a problem, all that wiener stuff out there.
I know, I know that's a problem.
Everybody's trying to do wiener jokes.
But that story, depending on where you go, still hasn't going away.
Somebody, there's an AP has a, I think it's AP, New York Times.
Somebody's got a story praising CBS for ignoring it.
And in their new, yeah, Scott Pella.
Yeah, yeah, taking a high road, Scott.
Of course, there's nothing new about CBS ignoring Democrat sex scandals.
I don't think they ignored Mark Foley or any of that.
As I have been telling you, and I know people, it makes people nervous when I say if the election were today, Obama would lose.
Well, it makes some people nervous because they tell me so.
You know, Russia's too much can happen here, as you say.
And it's way too soon here to be so confident of the outcome.
Well, I'm not confident of the outcome 18 months from now, but if it were today, I'm telling you, the guy doesn't have a prayer, folk.
And now there's new economic news probably celebrating in the White House.
U.S. consumer sentiment worsens on economic jitters.
And the media is blaming Europe for this.
The IMF is saying, you know, you guys, U.S., better get your budget deficit in order.
That's just a call to raise the debt limit.
But there isn't any inspiring economic news out there except for a new T that's been released on the market this week.
There isn't any.
There's no good uplifting news on the unemployment front or any of this.
And There's nothing whatsoever that's happening in the country.
There's one caveat, and it's going to be very, and my brother, my brother David, wrote his latest column is really good on this.
You and I, as conservatives, we sit here and we look at the data and examine the status quo of the moment.
And we apply our natural conservatism to the news and the events.
And we say to ourselves that there's no way the American people are going to support this.
But the caveat is, and this is, it's an open question.
How far along the line are we that a lot of Americans view the primary purpose of the federal government to equalize outcomes in life, not opportunity, but to equalize outcomes.
How many times will we take a call from a liberal on this program and you will think, my God, how can somebody think this?
Somebody who's got vitriol for the rich, upset that the CEO is making all of this money and eagerly wanting to do whatever to punish people who are doing better than they are.
And we've all grown up with the belief that capitalism is the primary reason for the greatest economic story in human history, the United States of America.
Well, some people say it's ancient history, but there's more and more people, this is the caveat, more and more people think that capitalism is inherently flawed and immoral and are willing to let the United States lose superpower status in all areas because they got a chip on their shoulder and they think the U.S. deserves to come up and say, we know we've got somebody in the White House who thinks that.
So for those of us who believe in the traditions and the institutions and the historical evidence of the founding of the country, there's a percentage of our population, as you well know, that thinks the purpose of the government is to get even with some people, to basically redistribute income, to equalize outcomes.
Regardless what it means for the country, regardless what it means for the future, it is this.
And it's that's the lone caveat when this election comes up, because Obama, of course, stands just for that.
And there are a lot of people who would just as soon government redistribute, get even with the achievers, spread the spoils around theoretically, because it never works, but they would rather than work themselves, rather than utilize their ambition and their talents and so forth for whatever reason they don't think they have any.
So that does remain the lone caveat to this slam dunk.
Otherwise, if the election were held today, Obama would have a prayer.
And according to a Gallup poll released yesterday, Obama would fall to an unnamed Republican candidate by a narrow margin if the election were held today.
That was the generic ballot.
Although 44% of respondents said they would vote for a Republican candidate when asked whom they would support in the 2012 election, only 39% said they'd vote for Obama.
18% of respondents said they had no opinion yet.
This poll was based on telephone interviews conducted with 914 registered voters between June the 9th and June the 12th.
Margin of error plus or minus four points.
While the Gallup report notes that the Republican Party's lead is statistically insignificant, the numbers suggest the race is close.
Course, it's close.
Recent surveys have shown that Obama usually fares well in a head-to-head matchup against the current Republican candidate.
So, this is a generic, and this is Gallup, but it's a one- or two-point differential.
So, maybe what we need to do is nominate a Republican and have him go down to the birth certificate office, say, okay, I'm changing my name to nothing.
They said, I'm going to get the nomination.
I'm going to take my name.
So, there can't be a name on the ballot.
It just says Republican there.
Or change my name to generic.
Though Gallup poll released on Sunday reported 67% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were satisfied with the peel of the field, there is continuing sentiment here that the field is weak.
And I just disagree with that in many ways, as we've discussed earlier in the week.
Now, if Obama loses to a generic Republican, a generic Republican, this is the way I look at it.
Imagine how he would be clobbered by a brand name conservative.
This story, generic Republican beats Obama barely.
Okay, depending on where you are at their RNC or other hierarchy of Republican command and control, they might interpret that as, okay, let's soft pedal who we are.
Let's not rock the boat, but you know, be kind of milquetoast.
That's the way to win.
No.
If a generic, unnamed Republican beats Obama in the Gallup poll, imagine how he would be clobbered.
This is what we all know.
He clobbered by a brand name conservative.
You notice here that Gallup says Obama's re-election prospects were not even improved back in May by the Osama bounce.
Gallup warns that all bets are off if the economy improves.
Now, luckily for the Republicans, there's little chance that Obama will do anything to improve the economy.
And it is an open question how much significant improvement can there be in the economy between now and the election.
Now, that's not the question.
The question is how big an illusion of a roaring economy can be created by the media that would be believed.
Well, we think it's impossible because gasoline prices are what they are, and food prices are what they are, and home prices are what they are.
So, Americans are living their lives.
Here comes the media.
Hey, the economy's coming back, babes.
We are roaring.
And the American people say, but snurdily, it has happened.
People who are encountering no economic pain whatsoever believe we were in a recession because they were told that it was bad out there.
It was good for them, and they even felt guilty about it because they thought their neighbors were hurting because the media told them so.
I know people are feeling the pain themselves, but if they think that others who were feeling the pain no longer are, they can be made to believe that a recovery is taking place.
Again, all bets are off.
John Harwood was on CNBC Squawk on the streets of the Harwood segment called the Harwood File.
Simon Hobbes, the co-host, said half of Americans think a new recession is on the way, according to a new NBC poll that we got this week.
With that in mind, politicians are playing a blame game like never before.
So, tell us more about this, Mr. Harwood.
We're going to be playing that blame game all the way through the 2012 election.
Let's break it down a little bit with this NBC Wall Street Journal poll.
First of all, President Obama owns the economy because he's been in office for a couple of years.
But is it his fault?
When you ask people in the NBC Wall Street Journal poll, 62% of the people say the president inherited these bad economic policies rather than had caused them with his own policies.
It's a dialogue that we're going to have back and forth until November of 2012.
Not sure how the public is going to react over time, whether they're going to end up blaming the president more than they do right now.
We will see, guys.
Right.
Okay.
So they clearly are going to bank on the polls.
Harwood and the boys in the drive-bys are going to invest in them.
I mean, they use the polls to make news, not reflect it.
President Obama owns the economy because he's been in office for a couple of years.
But is it his fault when you ask people in our poll, the NBC poll, 62% say the president inherited these bad economic policies rather than caused them?
62% believe that.
Their poll told them that 62% of the American people still blame Bush.
I happen to think that's bunk.
I don't think 62% of the American people blame Bush.
This guy's got two and a half years of a record of trying to fix it.
And I know he's saying it was so bad, it was much worse than we even knew that it's going to take my policies even longer to fix, but there's not a sign anywhere that there is any improvement.
But regardless, Mr. Harwood here is telling us how the media is going to approach this.
It's Bush's fault, and they're going to tell us that the American people think so.
It reminds me during Clinton Lewinsky.
Every night during the Clinton Lewinsky scandal, you watch NBC, MSNBC, and every Democrat strategist from Lammy Davis on down was the American people don't want this.
The American people don't want anything.
The American people don't think there's anything wrong with this.
The American people are fine with.
American people think there's too much it's.
American people want the Republicans to shut up and Ken Starter to go away and let the president get back to work.
There was no such evidence, but they just kept saying that there was.
Just like here.
And interestingly, it's the same poll, NBC, hey, there's nothing to see here.
Public 62% still blame Bush.
Obama's not any problems doing the best he can.
So I know that nothing's a fait accompli.
I know that nothing's automatic.
So don't misunderstand.
I'm not saying it's in the in the tank and we can all relax.
Far from that.
They'll rush both the Excellence IN Broadcasting Network, where we have been in it, to win.
It from the start looks to me like Obama's slogan for 2012 is going to be something like, we fixed everything except what Bush broke, and we promised to fix that and we're working on it and and according to the news media, you can see it shaping up here.
According to the news media, the rest of the Democrat party machinery, the economy just about perfect folks, except there's a few bumps in the road.
But except for those details, everything pretty much been wonderful since Obama took over.
Everything's fine and we're working hard every day to uh make it better for everybody, so it's really not as bad as you think.
And Michelle Bachman either, had a great comment on Obama and that and it's it's she, I mean nailed this.
It's right on the money.
He has no empathy whatsoever for people who are suffering none, and you know it is obvious.
The assumption is, he's president, he's a liberal, he cares.
He doesn't doesn't look like it.
He doesn't, he doesn't, you know, you, you, you can tell the kind of person someone is.
You just, you, you, you can size them up pretty quickly.
And there just isn't any recognition or empathy.
It's just all these people in the country that make up these economic statistics are just that statistics.
And we're working on it, and we're urging everybody here to be patient, but no real empathy, no sense of understanding, because Obama's never been where they are.
The private sector, and of course, that's what happens in the private sector.
We tried to warn you, okay, you like capitalism?
Fine.
You're going to get fired.
You're going to get hurt.
You're going to suffer.
A lot of people are going to make more money than you are.
So live with it and love it.
If you like capitalism, you deserve to be in pain.
That's what it causes.
It's almost the point of view.
Chris Christie, last night in New Jersey, public TV, Christie on the line.
This is why people like the guy.
Pre-recorded videotape question.
A woman named Gail says, you don't send your kids to public schools.
You send them to private schools.
I was wondering, Governor, why do you think it's fair to be cutting school funding to public schools?
Hey, Gail, you know what?
First off, it's none of your business.
I don't ask you where you send your kids to school.
Don't bother me about where I send mine.
Secondly, I pay $38,000 a year in property taxes for a public school system predominantly in Mendem that my wife and I don't choose to utilize because we believe we've decided as parents that we believe a religious education should be part of our children's everyday education.
So we send our children to parochial school.
Third, I, as governor, am responsible for every child in this state, not just my own.
And the decisions that I make are to try to improve the educational opportunities of every child in this state.
So with all due respect, Gail, it's none of your business.
Now, who talks to constituents that way?
So here you have this snooty constituent.
You don't send your kids to public schools.
So who are you?
You're rich.
You send your kids to private schools.
I was wondering, why do you think it's fair to be cutting school funding to public schools?
You know, it's in your kids.
And the governor talking to a voter says, hey, you know what?
It's none of your business.
Shut up.
None of your business.
I don't ask you where you send your kids to school, so don't bother me about where I send mine.
I spend 30, that's Chris Christie.
It's why people, I'm playing the soundbite just as an example here, why people like the guy.
I spend $38,000 a year on taxes for a public school system I don't even utilize.
It's none of your business what I do with my kids.
It's none of your business where I send my kids.
As governor, I've got to pay attention to the education for every kid in this state.
Where I send my kids is none of your business.
I don't call you and ask you where you're sending your kids, so shut up.
That's why people like the guy.
And welcome back, Open Mind Friday, Rush Limbaugh, the only man known to suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Telephone numbers 800-282.
Blank stares through the glass.
Is he about to blow his stack in there?
Stirdley already having trouble on the phones.
It's one of those days, and I want to come in there and just put on a headset, start screening calls, and be done with it.
Why?
Tell me.
Tell me, what did you re...
Well, but I did start with nothing way, way back.
That's the whole point, 23 years ago.
Started with nothing a couple times.
I've lost everything a couple times.
Some snot-nosed liberal on the phone started.
You got to put these guys up.
They're plethora of their golden opportunities.
You need to stand your own benefit when you got money.
Advertising, yeah, yeah, easy.
You bring them in and well, how about post-if I don't have any money up?
In fact, that's one of the reasons that Catherine and I decided to do this.
Sometimes I'll tell the whole story.
I have other things to do here at the moment.
Folks, this is from Robert Stacey McCain, the American Spectator blog.
Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin expected within a week to make a decision on whether to enter the 2012 presidential campaign, according to one Republican source, vendors of campaign services who hope to work for Team Palin.
I guess vendors of campaigns are like pollsters and buttons and signs, t-shirts and stuff.
They've been told that Palin will decide soon, one way or another, on mounting a 2012 campaign.
Which takes us to the audio sound bites.
Once again, this morning on America's newsroom, Fox News channel Bill Hemmer talked to the founder and president of Rasmussen Report, Scott Rasmussen.
And Hemmer said, okay, here are the latest numbers that you report.
45% of the Republican primary voters think it'd be bad for the party if Palin officially throws her name in the ring.
This was among Republican primary voters.
What's going on here?
Well, with these numbers, Scott, what do they suggest?
Republican primary voters like Sarah Palin.
They like her feistiness.
They like her position on issues.
They even like the kind of enemies she's made.
But a lot of Republicans don't want to see her become their presidential nominee.
Some because they think she's unelectable, some for other reasons.
Her power in the party, though, makes her a very likely candidate to be a king or queenmaker this year.
In fact, it's hard to see any Republican winning the nomination unless Sarah Palin is at least somewhat supportive.
Anybody hear a disconnect in that?
We all love Rasmussen.
45%.
45% say that, and by the way, Palin has tweeted in response to this, knocking down this story that she's going to make up her mind next week.
The tweet says, really?
Hmm, guess they forgot to inform me what I'm expected to do next week.
So this is in response to the American Spectator blog that I just read from, which says that she's expected within a week to make a decision on whether to run.
So here's Rasmussen.
45% of Republican primary voters don't want her to be the candidate.
They love her.
They think she's great.
And she can probably be a king or queenmaker.
And it's hard to see any Republican winning a nomination unless Palin is somewhat supportive, but we don't want her to be the nominee.
I need somebody to explain that to me.
On the one hand, here's somebody that we like and we admire.
We like her feistiness, her position on the issues.
We like the kind of enemies that she's made, but we don't want to see her as a nominee.
But we realize that she's got the power to be a kingmaker or queenmaker, that it's hard to see any Republican winning a nomination unless she is somewhat supportive.
But we don't want her to be the nominee.
Now, if you don't want her to be the nominee for what?
She can't win, she's unelectable, she's embarrassing, whatever it is, then why would you want her anywhere near a campaign advocating for anybody else?
If Sarah Palin, as a candidate, can't win, how in the world does she help anybody else by supporting them?
Why wouldn't she drag them down?
This is what I don't understand about this.
And this is an open-ended question.
I'm not disputing Rasmussen because, as you know, I'm not a professional pollster, but I don't get the disconnect.
To me, it is a disconnect.
On the one hand, love her, love her feistiness, love the way this woman takes on the media.
We love her issues, don't want her to be the nominee, but boy, whoever the nominee is, can't get anywhere unless she supports it.
Why?
It seems to me that if she's so toxic that she couldn't be the nominee, that she would drag down anybody else that she tended to support or get behind.
Fascinating.
Oh, one more.
Rasmussen was asked by, well, no, he just continued.
He had one more thing to say about that.
The good news for Republicans is just about all Republican primary voters say no matter who wins the nomination, they're going to back that nominee against Barack Trump.
Right.
So, again, Elmer Fudd would win the I mean, Republicans vote for Elmer Fudd.
Doesn't matter whoever the Republicans nominate will probably be preferable to Obama.
And that, at the end of the day, is true.
I would hate to squander the opportunity here to have a robust conservative as the nominee, and we will not rest until that quest is satisfied.
There's a story that fascinates me.
Again, bouncing off what I discussed earlier in the program, more and more Americans, seemingly, we don't know how many, but seemingly openly disdainful of capitalism, seemingly embracing the whole notion that the purpose of government is to equalize outcomes, to make sure that everybody ends up being treated fairly by the system.
And that it's the job of the government to redistribute income so that everybody has something.
And there is that sentiment.
We don't know how widespread.
There's a story by Christia Freeland, who is the editor of Thompson Reuters Digital.
She has a story in the Atlantic.com magazine.
14 biggest ideas of the year.
And I want to focus on what she says here is number three.
The rich are different from you and me.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Great Gets Me, the rich are always with us, as we learned from the Betty Davis film of that name, released in the teeth of the Great Depression.
The most memorable part of that movie was its title.
But that terrific phrase turns out not to be entirely true.
In every society, some people are richer than others.
But across time and geography, the gap between the rich and the rest has varied widely.
The reality today is that the rich, especially the very, very rich, are vaulting way ahead of everybody else.
Between 2002 and 2007, 65% of all income growth in the United States went to the richest 1% of the population.
But did you still have that snibbling caller who was upset?
Did you put him up?
Good.
Her?
Okay, fine.
Between 2002 and 2007, 65% of all income growth in the U.S. went to the richest 1% of the population.
Like Nancy Pelosi, by the way, we might add.
Pelosi's wealth during the recession has ballooned 62%.
This is the one thing they never tell you when they do all these stories about the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Who the hell are the rich?
Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, their net worth vaulted 62% during the recession.
Nancy Pelosi, this caring, big-hearted, compassionate liberal.
You never hear about it.
The rise of today's super rich, writes Christia Freeland, is a global phenomenon.
It's particularly marked in the United States, but it's also happening in other developed economies like the United Kingdom and Canada.
Income inequality, also increasing in most of the go-go emerging market economies, and is now as high in communist China as it is in the U.S. Income inequality.
Well, take note because the CHICOMs, at the end of the day, are still a bunch of communists.
I don't know if you liberal-loving socialists out there realize even during the heyday of the Soviet Union, the elites, they still stole all the money.
There was no redistribution of wealth.
Go to Canada.
How's everybody faring down, or Cuba, rather?
All of you people think that it's a wonderful thing for government to redistribute wealth so everybody does well at the end.
It never works because people end up at the top taking all the money for themselves.
Read the book, Reckless Engagement.
Jim Johnson, James Johnson, the guy Fannie Mae, siphoned $2 to $3 billion of federal money to Fannie Mae for himself and people in the executive suite to pay themselves.
And how many of the richest 1% were exactly the same richest 1% year to year, decade to decade?
It always changes.
People fall in and out of that group.
The super rich work and play together, she writes.
They jet between the four seasons in Shanghai and the four seasons in New York to do business.
Christia, I hate to tell you, but the super rich you're talking about are not staying in hotels.
The super, super rich you're talking about don't stay in hotels.
Well, in Davos, they may stay at a hotel.
When they have, you know, Herbie Allen's media seminar, they may stay at hotels.
They own houses where they rich, super rich, run around and play, or they stay on their yachts.
I'm talking about the really, they're very, very rich, as she describes it here.
The very, very rich are not hanging around hotels.
They go to St. Bart's, they stay on Paul Allen's yacht or Jay-Z's my buck.
I don't know where they go, but they hang around a hotel now and then, but that's not.
How do I know?
Well, don't doubt me.
Many of the very, very rich are global nomads with a fistful of passports, far-flung homes.
They have more in common with one another than with the folks in the hinterland back home, and increasingly they're forming a nation under themselves.
Hey, Christia, it's true of every group.
The Hollywood left is far more comfortable with each other.
I mean, Cameron Diaz, who's she dating?
A-Rod, not some gasoline station owner.
You know, people hang out in the same group.
Well, don't tell me they broke up.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
A-Rod and Cameron Diaz are no more.
Oh, I got to take a break.
And I got a, I got, because this woman, Christian, what's her face Freeland?
At the end of this piece, she stumbles into something.
I'm sure she doesn't even realize how it undercuts the entire impression she's trying to make about these very rich people.
Coming up in a minute.
Hey, we're back.
Rushland bought the cutting edge of societal evolution, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
In North Korea, the richest 1% are the people who run the government.
But there's no great equality in that country.
The rest of the people eat dog.
I'm not kidding.
How much more money would be available for other people to get rich if the government didn't take so much of it?
Before the government can redistribute it, it has to take it from people.
And who are they to decide anyway?
Who are they to decide what's fair?
Who is the government to decide who ends up with what?
They aren't.
As a matter of fact, folks, how many more people would have jobs and homes if the government didn't take so much money from everybody and everything?
You know, somebody who is rich is not hurting somebody who's poor or middle class or what have you.
Rich person is not hurting anybody.
You take all the money away from the rich.
Where do the people who work for them go?
What happens to them?
Somebody who's rich is not hurting anybody who's poor or middle class, but some politician, government bureaucrat can destroy your job.
Somebody in government can destroy your profession, regulate your profession out of existence.
Somebody in government can take your assets, can drive up your costs and prices, do more harm to you than any other person or people.
And we look at them as the great equalizers.
I'll get to the finish of this Christian Freeland story.
I want to grab a phone call here quickly, Openline Friday.
Diane in Coronado, California.
Hi, I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
To start with, I have ordered a case of your tea.
Thank you.
And thank you.
And also, I was wondering: are we able to buy stock in your company?
No, it's privately held.
Oh, okay.
Too bad.
Privately held.
My deceased husband started a business back in 1973 here in Tucson, Arizona.
That's where our main home is.
We're vacationing right now in Coronado.
And we are, my husband and I, I'm a Rush lady, and my husband listens to you, my new husband.
We've been married 10 years.
And he also was a, he had his own, he was a custom home builder.
But both of us, you know, both, we all started with nothing.
We had to scrape our money to start anything to get a business going.
And so did I.
Well, yeah, but not with your tea.
No, but the tea didn't, it wasn't the first thing I've done in my life.
Yeah, but I had to make some money first.
I worked for most of my life for.
I know.
I really appreciate all you've done.
And I'm really, I know just about everything about you, and I just love you.
And you can tell Catherine's good for you because you really are a different person since you married Catherine.
Well, that's true.
That's very, that's very true.
Diane, thanks much for the call.
Are we through?
Appreciate it.
I haven't even begun this talk.
Well, I got 30 seconds left.
I know, but you've used up most of your time.
So I thought you were going to complain about something.
Okay, what I'm going to say is that maybe, okay, you didn't start your tea from scratch.
You have a lot of money to put into it to begin with.
You have your own advertising, your number one show.
How many people start off with a new business with all that you had going for you?
I didn't start a new business with all that I got.
I had to succeed after a number of failures and going broke.
I had to succeed for a long time before doing this.
And I'm not guaranteed a success doing this.
There's no guarantee that this is going to turn to profit.
It's all a risk.
Every time I'm plunking my own, at least I'm not asking for some government grant here or a subsidy to do this.