I'll tell you, every time I swig this stuff, I just, I actively love it.
Yeah, I'm talking about two if-by-tea, my tea.
And I don't, I don't feel embarrassed saying that.
And I don't want to preface it by saying, folks, please forgive me here for a moment because I don't want to be forgiven.
I chug this stuff.
I remember the diet raspberry iced tea.
I chose it.
I chose the flavor.
Catherine and I chose the four flavors here.
We had a couple others helping us out.
Of course, nothing's ever a two-man show, but this stuff is good.
Even if I say so myself, it is good.
You know, 4th of July is coming up hot, summertime days, barbecues, playing golf in the afternoons, whatever.
Chugging a cold bottle of two if-by-tea is a pleasure experience that awaits you.
The only thing standing in your way is you may not have any, which you can get.
We have free delivery, 12 packs.
We sell it at 2IFBT.com.
T-W-O-2IFBT.com.
That's just, it's just, it's delicious.
It's my baby.
Every bottle I open, you know, gee, I hope it tastes the same as the last bottle.
And I do.
And it does.
And we're glad to have you back, folks.
Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We are in Los Angeles all week, and that's why we don't have the DittoCam available.
At some point when we're broadcasting out here, we will have the Ditto Cam up and running, but we don't have it up and running this trip.
Next week, it will be back.
If you're just joining us, the Democrats are trying to pull off something really audacious and really big, folks.
I spotted it in the first hour of the program.
It had nothing to do with Afghanistan, nothing to do with the president's speech last night.
Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer had a joint Senate press conference yesterday, and they more than casually blamed the Republicans for sabotaging the economy and purposely wanting the economy to do poorly, purposely destroying jobs all for their reelection chances.
They said it.
Now, everybody knows that the Democrats own this destruction.
Obama and the Democrats, you own this, kids.
You have done this.
Your fingerprints are all over it.
The unemployment, the home foreclosures, the stock market, the coming inflation, the massive deficits, the subprime mortgage business, the fact that people's homes are underwater.
You did this.
There is no question you did it, and you are going to pay a huge political price for it in November of 2012.
You can try to blame this on the Republicans all you want.
In the process, you are indicting yourselves.
This is the great thing about this.
They always project and they always accuse us of doing what they themselves are doing by accusing the Republicans of purposely harming the economy and job creation.
They are telling us that that's what they are doing.
They are telling us that they admit that it's purposeful.
This is not an accident.
It's not some simple mistake, misguided policy.
Oh, yeah, Obama and all the rest of you Democrats, we have heard you tell us we need to keep spending.
Even yesterday, even yesterday, we heard you say the stimulus would cut unemployment to under 8%.
We heard you say it.
We've listened to everything you've said about the fact that you haven't spent enough money, that you really need to spend even more, that the situation is worse than it was when you found it and even more spending is required.
We heard you say that you were going to lower the oceans.
We heard you say that Obamacare would cut medical costs.
We heard you say that Obamacare would cut the deficit.
We heard you say that Obamacare would cut your premiums, your insurance premiums, by $2,500.
We heard you say that Obamacare would increase access to health care.
We heard you say that if we like our doctor and our current policy, that we could keep it.
We heard it.
Everybody heard it.
Your slavish media reported it too, over and over and over.
Obama and the Democrats, you were in our faces.
You were in our ears.
You were tweeting.
You were yelling.
You were laughing.
You were Facebooking.
You were having a grand old time out there destroying this economy under the pretense of trying to get people jobs.
Keep them in their homes.
This is yours, Chuck U. Schumer.
This situation is yours, Senator Durbin, and yours, Obama.
The public cannot stand this.
They want no part of an economy like this.
They know full well that the Republicans haven't had one finger to do with this.
The Republicans haven't had the votes to stop Obama policies.
And the Republicans haven't had the votes to pass anything.
The American public cannot stand where we are, and they cannot stand you, Democrats.
Your poll numbers are in the toilet.
Obama's re-elect numbers, internal re-elect numbers are in the toilet.
And you wait until the full impact of your socialist policies takes hold and you haven't even, you don't even, because they haven't fully kicked in yet.
You have no idea what's in store for you once if Obamacare fully implements and all these waivers are taken away and a bunch of companies have to start eliminating health care insurance as an employee benefit because they can't afford it.
All that's going to happen.
And you, you can try to blame this on the Republicans all you want.
You're going to find a lot of Jonathan alters out there that'll go carry your water on it.
And I guarantee you that Alan Colmes, you won't even have to ask him.
He'll just, he'll be singing this song as soon as he can get himself on a Fox show.
But make no mistake, you own this.
You broke it.
And you own it.
Ben Bernanke, chairman of Federal Reserve, says he doesn't know why the economy is limping along.
From an equally stumped Associated Press, headline, economic trouble puzzles Fed Chief, too.
What economic trouble?
I thought we were in a recovery.
AP keeps telling us that.
And by the way, I thought Obama kept telling us we're in a covering.
What is this sabotaging the economy business?
See, we heard that too.
We hear Obama say we're in a recovery.
We read the media report what Obama says that we are in a recovery.
What is this economic sabotage then that's going on?
The economy's continuing struggles are not just confounding the ordinary American.
They've also stumped the head of the Federal Reserve.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told reporters Wednesday that the central bank had been caught off guard by recent signs of deterioration in the economy, and he said the troubles could continue into next year.
Oh, no.
We were supposed to be on our way to creating 500,000 new jobs every month by now, according to Senator or Vice President Bite Me.
So, in other words, Bernanke is saying that it is the economy holding the economy back.
That's what he said here.
Well, we don't have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting, but it's going to be more persistent than we thought.
So the economy is screwing up the economy.
That's, I guess, the answer.
It was the Fed shapes most explicit warning yet that the economy will face serious challenges next year.
For several months, Bernanke has said the factors working against economic growth appeared to be transitory.
Well, if you take a long enough view, everything's transitory.
Temporary, transitory.
Now, there's this confidence in this.
Here's the guy who's got all the answers.
Here's the guy that spent $2 trillion.
We still don't know who got it all.
$2 trillion to rebirth the U.S. economy.
He has no clue why it hasn't worked.
Does it have the slightest idea, folks, when it will start working?
That was AP.
Forbes is equally befuddled.
In his second press conference, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke touched on every topic, admitting the recovery was weaker than expected, and that temporary factors, it's beyond temporary factors like supply chain disruptions in Japan and high energy prices.
So it's not the Japanese earthquake.
Obama's not going to like that.
The regime's been focused on that as an excuse.
So it's not the Japanese earthquake.
It's not gasoline prices.
Something else is going on to sabotage the economy.
And Ben Bernanke says he doesn't know what it is.
He says we're in a soft patch.
He doesn't know what's causing it.
No weather to blame.
No natural disasters.
No way to look in a mirror to see the problem.
How about Obamacare, Mr. Bernanke?
You think it might have anything to do with that?
What this is?
Bernanke's saying he's a failure too.
Obama's a failure.
Bernanke is a failure.
Schumer and Durbin admit they are failures.
They are admitting there's economic sabotage going on.
I don't care how you slice this.
There's no way the Democrats win it.
The Democrats are in power.
Look at it this way.
Look at me.
They had the White House.
They got the House, or they had it until this past January.
They had the Senate.
And the last two years, the Republicans, without a majority anywhere, have sabotaged the great Obama.
The Republicans, these idiots, right?
When everybody's looking at them, have sabotaged the economy?
Why, how smart can Bernanke and Durbin and Schumer be if they let the Republicans sabotage the economy?
How could that happen?
Republicans did this under the cover of darkness.
Republicans did this sabotage when nobody was looking?
The Republicans put one over on the great Obama, destroying his economic plans, causing unemployment.
This is pathetic.
This means that they know they own it.
Mr. Bernanke, let me tell you what the factors are that you just can't seem to figure out here to explain this.
Leftists, liberals, socialism, spending, spending, spending, and your printing.
Does that maybe help?
But on the other side of this, on the other side of this, ladies and gentlemen, by virtue of the chairman of the Fed now, look at me.
By virtue of the chairman of the Fed saying he has no idea what has happened by the chairman, the all-powerful chairman of the Federal Reserve saying he's clueless, befuddled.
He has no idea how this can happen.
Does that not open the door for the Democrats to blame sabotage?
Republican sabotage.
I see how all this is shaping up now.
How long did it take them to conceive this?
The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right 99.6% of the time.
Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Bernanke, specifically, we all here have a suggestion as to what's causing all the trouble.
Now, we aren't economists, but we do know a little history.
And what we know is that throughout human history, Obamanomics has failed every time it's tried.
Keynesian spending never works.
Socialism never creates prosperity, nor does communism.
It doesn't work.
There's your problem.
It's Obama.
It's not complicated.
Ray in Chicago.
Great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
It's an honor and a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
You know, I think, well, I've got a couple of statements and a question.
If this were private business and a man you had hired to do the job that Member Nanke has been hired to do came into the board meeting and stated, well, I've done all I can and I don't know what to do.
Would there be anything to do other than to ask for his resignation?
No, he'd be gone.
Why isn't everybody, including the Democrats, asking for the man's resignation?
Oh, that would admit culpability on their part.
They're not going to do that.
Well, he's already admitted it.
But getting rid of him is that's like a nail in the coffin.
That's like the Democrats admitting they, the Democrats, are the problem here.
And now they're trying to blame the Republicans for the sabotage.
So Bernanke is just an innocent bystander victim.
They're not going to get rid of him.
They don't get rid of their own.
They do not get rid of their own.
It takes a wiener type scandal before they get rid of their own.
And they don't even really like getting rid of guys like Wiener.
Well, you're probably right about that.
They don't.
They had no way.
These people do not throw themselves overboard.
They do not throw themselves under the bus.
They don't care.
They don't take action that will harm their ideology.
They're not going to shoot themselves on purpose.
They do get circular firing squads going, but they're not like us.
We will shoot ourselves on purpose to show that we're good people.
They won't.
If this were a Republican president, Bernanke's out there saying this stuff, the Republican president, of course, would be asking for his resignation.
He can't really.
The guy serves independently for all practical purposes, but there would still be a clamor for him to go.
I still think, folks, let me just be blunt once again.
I don't care what they're trying to sell today that the Democrats, the Democrats are trying to blame the Republicans for this sabotage.
I still think that Bernanke is doing what he was hired to do.
I think what the Democrats are doing is trying to escape blame for this.
They know how mad you are.
They know how fit to be tied you are over what's happened to your 401k, to your kids' future, your own future, your job, your house.
They know, they know how mad you are.
They knew that was going to happen.
They're not idiots.
They know if they set out on a course to fundamentally transform the country, change the economy, and get rid of the roots to capitalism since our founding.
They know it's going to upset people.
So what they're trying to do now is fix the blame elsewhere.
They just try to escape the blame.
That's this latest policy, or this latest trick, if you will.
But Bernanke is simply doing what he was hired to do, as is Obama.
As are they all.
How can you say this, Mr. Limbaugh?
Do you keep saying this is outrageous?
We the new Castrati, we want to believe you, Mr. Limbaugh.
How can you say, okay, let me ask you this.
Mr. Neil Castrati, if, take your pick, Bernanke, Obama, Schumer, Durbin, if they don't want the economy to tank, if they really don't want it to tank, they would be doing far different things than what they're doing.
If they don't want the economy to tank, they wouldn't be adopting positions assuring the piling up of more debt.
If they didn't want more uncertainty, if they didn't want what's happening here, they would embark on policies designed to create jobs, increase revenue to the treasury, have some confidence and certainty in the economy for businesses large and small.
They're not doing any of that.
If they really wanted what they claim to want, they'd stop all this.
They got two and a half years of failure as a track record.
It's obvious what to do, and they're not doing it.
Let's go back, shall we?
Ladies and gentlemen, here's a story from, let's see, this was from April 3rd of 2010.
And this is the Los Angeles Times, interestingly enough.
April 3rd, just a little over, 14 months ago, Obama says economy is starting to turn the corner.
At a North Carolina plant, the president points to job numbers as proof that his economic policies are taking hold and says the U.S. has a moral imperative to reform health care.
President Obama on Friday pointed to improving job numbers as proof that his policies are taking hold while contending that the new health care law is a moral response to a large number of uninsured Americans.
So, what sabotage?
14 months ago, the economy roaring out there.
Huge, big guns.
14 months later, sabotage.
See, this is why they ultimately aren't going to get away with this.
We know what they've said.
We know what they've done.
And so does everybody else.
Jim in Alexandria, Virginia.
Hi, welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
Welcome.
Hi, Rush.
How are you doing?
It's an honor to talk to you.
I've been listening to you since 1937.
Well, that's cool.
I'm happy to note that.
That's Biden map.
Hey, Rush, real quick, just since you're the all-knowing, all-compassionate Maha Rushi, I think I know a way you can realize a lifelong dream and reduce the number of unemployed, hardworking Americans at the same time.
I think you and all the other rich guys that have been turned down for ownership by the bureaucrats at the NFL should pick up the contracts of all those unemployed football players that are out of work because of their mean owners.
Because seriously, the owners locked out the players, which I think is a lot like McDonald's locking out their hamburgers.
You know, nobody tunes in on Sunday to see what Jerry Jones is going to do.
So, so, I mean, look at what Jerry Jones really owns.
He has a name and a logo and the contracts of 50 players that he just fired.
So, let's say you and a few of the other guys that you play golf with buy up the contracts for the Rams, rename them the St. Louis Rammers, and then you sign a 50-50 agreement the players are holding out for, and then offer the IPO to Goldman Sachs.
The upside for an IPO for a proven business with a devoted clientele and was it $8 billion in revenue?
You could actually get rich.
Yep, and save America at the same time.
That's right.
And put a finger in the eye of people that picked Fernie over you as an owner.
Well, you know, I love the entrepreneurial spirit as it lives in your heart there.
But we are on the verge of this NFL lockout, whatever else.
We're on the verge of this thing being solved.
It's not a done deal yet, but they're pretty close.
They may have, they've made, I mean, it's never to the point that somebody could say something and not blow it up, but they're pretty close now.
They're getting pretty close to where they're going to start committing things to paper here.
Well, I'm very sad, Rush, because the thought of you in the owner's box has a lot of appeal for me.
I think I would be, I know what you're talking about.
I would be an owner, people would come out to watch.
I don't think there's any question about that.
I think you are extremely observant.
So you are showing here a unique talent for observation.
What about 2F by T Stadium?
Think of the marketing possibility.
Yeah, well, on the team, you kind of have an inside angle on the naming rights.
Right.
Out of one pocket into the other, I'm telling you, it can work out.
Well, I like the way you think.
I really do.
Two if by T Stadium.
Can you imagine what would happen if we simply tried to buy naming rights or some new stadium?
I must be honest, I've never understood it.
You know, they're trying to get a team here in Los Angeles, and Farmers Insurance has anti it up.
They've promised, as part of the gambit to get the team, they have guaranteed $800 million in naming rights for a new stadium to be built over, I think, the usual period of time, 20 years.
Now, the theory is that it's advertising.
Every time there's an event at the place, it's called Farmers Insurance Stadium.
And I've speaking as a consumer, you know, there's Continental Airlines Arena.
It has never, ever made me oriented to fly Continental Airlines.
Nothing against Continental Airlines.
American Airlines Arena or PepsiCo Field.
It does not, that's not how advertising works on me.
I know it keeps the name out there, but I'm into results-oriented advertising.
I don't care so much about making impressions.
There's all kinds of different theories involved in advertising.
Cost per thousand is basically you don't care what you sell as a result of that expenditure.
You're more interested in brand recognition, just getting the brand seen, because it's believed that that familiarity at some point will then pay off.
And of course, hard to argue against it.
Coca-Cola, McDonald's, or others.
But I, El Rushbo, specialize in results-oriented.
I move product, and I don't, even if we were to have two if by tea stadium, the only reason I would do it would be get my picture on the stadium just to tick people off.
Not because I would think that would sell more tea, although I would require two if by tea as a concession in the stadium if we were to get the naming rights.
But that's that is that is that is very expensive.
I've never understood the value of it in terms of naming rights.
I know what it is when you're talking about sports.
And don't doubt me on this because I've seen it.
I've worked in sports and I know that everybody in it is a groupie.
Everybody.
Even some owners are groupies in certain sports.
Many of the sports writers are nerd geek groupies.
The clubhouse attendants, everybody, you know, sports is akin to American royalty.
It's all on television.
The people who perform these sports well are instant stars and can get away with anything off the field.
It's the ingredients are all there.
And of course, people want to bask in the glow of all of that attention.
So it attracts a lot of groupies, which is why jobs at professional sports teams really don't pay all that much at most levels because they can get anybody to do it for free.
I mean, they have to pay people legally, but you wouldn't believe a number of people who work in the PR department for nothing just to be able to say that they do.
And by contrast, there are groupies in corporate boardrooms.
And if it costs them $20 million a year to hobnob with the owner of a team and maybe get to go to the locker room and travel on a couple of trips every year, okay, here's $20 million to put the name of my product on your stadium.
You can't be serious, Mr. Lambo.
You really mean that American businesses will make decisions based on the species.
Yes, Mr. Newcastrovi.
Business decisions are made on all kinds of things, different criteria.
And there are, I don't care what sport you're talking.
There are more groupies in it that are not, including employees, people, staff being paid at the various organizations.
It is inarguable.
Okay, back we are.
El Rush Bo serving humanity here, the EIB network.
This is kind of funny.
This is this morning in Washington on Capitol Hill, a House Budget Committee hearing on the federal budget, the National Debt Outlook.
During the Q ⁇ A, the chairman, Paul Ryan, Republican Wisconsin, is talking to the Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf.
And they had this exchange.
Now, this is the chairman of the Congressional Budget Office, a director, talking about Obama's proposed budget framework.
We got your reanalysis of the president's budget.
I won't go back into that.
But the president gave a speech on April 13th where he outlined a new budget framework that claims $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years.
Have you estimated the budget impact of this framework?
No, Mr. Chairman, we don't estimate speeches.
We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.
No, Mr. President, we do not estimate speeches.
A profound put-down of the one by his bud over at the CEO, CBO, Doug Elmendorf.
By the way, just so you think I'm not making it up, here's Bernanke.
So it sounds like 12.
This is Bernanke yesterday afternoon in Washington, his press conference, where he says he doesn't have the slightest idea why the economy is doing so poorly.
We don't have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting.
One way to think about it is that maybe some of the headwinds that have been concerning us, like the weakness in the financial sector, problems in the housing sector, balance sheet and deleveraging issues, some of these headwinds may be stronger or more persistent than we thought.
And I think it's an appropriate balance to attribute a slowdown partly to these identifiable temporary factors, but to acknowledge the possibility that some of the slowdown is due to factors which are longer lived and which will be still operative by next year.
The headwinds.
That's what it was.
That's the answer.
Headwinds.
He's up at 35,000 feet.
He's flying around.
There are headwinds up there.
What did he mean by headwinds?
He said, well, weakness in the financial sector.
That sounds like the economy.
Problems in the housing sector.
That sounds like the economy.
Balance sheet and deleveraging issues.
Quick question.
Do you know what he means by delevering issues off the top of your head?
If somebody were to ask you in a couple of sentences, could you answer the question?
I was just asking a certified CPA accountant money bags kind of guy whether or not deleveraging issues could be explained.
And the answer was in two sentences.
The answer is no.
Anyway, it sounds to me like I was only kidding about wanting an answer in two seconds.
It sounds to me like he's just saying the economy is in the way of the economy, and we don't know why the economy is doing what it's doing.
And it might extend into next year that we won't know why it's doing what it's doing.
And I just remember Clinton in the late 90s saying that they had defeated the business cycle.
I will never forget them saying that.
Zogby, you know, we don't hear much from Zogby polling anymore.
I don't know why, but we used to hear it all the time.
Rance Musen, we hear about a lot, and Gallup.
But Zogby has kind of vanished from the day-to-day, but he's out.
John Zogby with a new survey of nearly 1,000 likely Republican primary voters.
And he did the poll with our buddy Chris Ruddy at Newsmax.
And the poll says that both Chris Christie and Rick Perry of Texas would trounce Mitt Romney in the primary.
Mitt Romney, supposed frontrunner, would be trounced in a head-to-head race against either Rick Perry or Chris Christie.
That's Zogby Newsmax, holding David just out.
That's it, folks.
It's over.
Well, at least these three hours are over.
This exciting excursion into broadcast excellence.
Got to take a brief break here of 21 hours.
We'll go out and recharge and be back and rearing and ready to go.
Open Line Friday is our next program.
That's where you get to talk about whatever interests you, whether I care about it or not.
It's a once-a-week opportunity.
Great career risk for me, great opportunity for you.