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July 7, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:52
July 7, 2011, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
What is that uh what's that look on your face?
Really?
See what I'm gonna lead with.
You want to know what I'm gonna lead with.
I'm still trying to get myself in a good mood here, and you're worried about what I'm gonna, what I'm gonna lead with.
You know, honestly, it's very rare that I know what I'm gonna lead with.
I got all this stuff out in front of me, and whatever neuron impulse hits first is what happens.
How you doing, folks?
Great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, as always, behind the golden EIB microphone.
Uh, once again, uh the reason God invented radio.
Our telephone number me.
Uh reason God invented radio.
There's no doubt about it.
Um said it.
Uh telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address L Rushball at EIBNet.com.
All right, Kayleigh Anthony, if you know, it was it was funny.
It was outrage and panic when the original sentence was thought to be a year because again, every media expert said she's gonna walk out of there today.
And she thought she was too.
She had a new hairdo and covered up those ears.
She's got Obama ears.
They got dumbo ears.
She covered up the ears uh with the flowing locks, and uh then the judge announced what he announced.
Oh my god, they went to all the experts.
What does this mean?
Well, geez, she could be in there till 2012.
And then the Fox expert said, no, February, we've run the numbers on this, it's gonna be out in February.
That's not right.
She should be out today.
Time served, blah, blah, blah.
Uh the judge obviously had read Ann Coulter's column.
Ann Coulter had a great column about this yesterday to the people of Orlando.
Uh, while a cops were chasing down all the lies that this woman told, other crimes were not being pursued, and other criminals were not being pursued.
How much money?
How much money did this woman cost the taxpayers of Orlando for sending the cops out on a bunch of lies?
And the judge pretty much said that.
I thought Judge read Ann Coulter's column today.
Or yesterday.
The judge said that uh factoring in all the costs here, that uh he's gonna find her some money.
Turned out to be $4,000.
The short version of this is she gets out in a week.
Six days of July 13th.
But the uh again, all these experts had her walking out today.
So uh I'm I'm sure this story will continue now because the media was snookered.
Uh will continue now with a 24-hour cycle of analysis here on on why and how she has to spend another six days in jail.
And all the experts uh who were wrong in the first place will come back and tell us why this is the case.
Now, now the White House meeting today, the Republicans and the president on the debt ceiling.
You know, what what always happens here has happened.
I mean, uh it's uh you can't avoid it happening.
It's it's how you deal with it if you're the Republicans that that uh that matters.
What I mean the Republicans are forced into reacting.
Obama is the president, as such, in circumstances like this, president sets the premise.
And then the Republicans react to that premise.
Now, there's a big difference between reacting to it and accepting it, and discussing it and debating it all within the context and confines of the premise as set forth by Obama.
So uh what happens uh here, I think the Republicans need to stop reacting to all of this talk about revenue.
I don't know if you know this or not, but Reuters put out an abject lie of a story last evening around 6 or 6:30, saying that John Kyle, Republican senator from Arizona, had agreed to tax increases.
And he hadn't.
And they knew it.
They were taking a An excerpt of some comments that Senator Kyle made on the Senate floor days earlier about something relatively unrelated to this.
And they just ran with it.
And a lot of people in the conservative blogosphere predictably started going nuts, and they started calling Kyle's office and accused him of being a traitor.
So Kyle's office said, what's going on here?
They looked into it.
They found out that Reuters are just lying about it.
So they put out their correction.
Everybody backed off against Kyle.
He was talking about revenues, but the kind of revenues that result from federal property being sold and this kind of thing.
He was not talking about tax increases.
Reuters tried to make it look like the Republicans secretly had already agreed with raising taxes, and they had not.
So this is the kind of thing that Republicans face.
You've got...
You've got Obama.
Another Reuters report, by the way, it says that, well, no, that's a different matter.
The thing I was going to mention is this, in the meeting today, and this has also been reported to press pretty much this way, This is an idea here of how misleading and dangerous this all is.
In the meeting today, Obama is going to let the Republicans take the blame for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising taxes.
That's what he hopes is reported when this is over.
And given that Reuters lied yesterday, what's to say that the media won't report it that way, no matter what happens.
At the end of this whole thing, Obama wants it reported that the Republicans secured their entitlement cuts.
Republicans succeeded in cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for raising taxes.
That's what Obama wants out of this today.
And he wants a long-term deal.
He wants some deal that they can go out there and say that there's two to three, maybe even four trillion dollars of deficit reduction when there won't be over 10, 15 years, what have you.
And that's what Obama's looking for at the end of this thing today.
Because he's looking for something to hang his hat on for his campaign for re-election.
And he knows the majority of Americans are opposed to every issue that he's put forth.
He knows that a vast majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
And he knows why.
He cares only to the extent that he can massage it to get re-elected.
So he knows what we think.
He knows we're fed up with all his spending.
He knows that we tie him to it.
What he's hoping to get is a news report that says he has succeeded in this meeting today of securing deficit reduction of $2, $3, or $4 trillion over 10 years, something.
Something like that.
And I hearken back to my message of yesterday.
This guy is the one who's run up all this debt.
He's the one who's run up all this spending.
And now after the fact, he gets, because he's the president with the media that really wishes he was king.
He gets to set the agenda, he gets to set the premise, and he gets to act like all this happened on its own, and now he is going to be fiscally responsible.
He's going to be the one that brings fiscal responsibility to all this.
And they're calling this deal where the Republicans get credit for cutting Social Security Medicare, i.e.
the blame in exchange for raising taxes.
They're calling that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
You've seen it, snertly.
You saw it in your show.
Media is calling this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Republicans.
Now the meeting, I keep talking about the meeting is over.
Uh and and Boehner just said that there's uh maybe a 50-50 chance of a debt deal reached within 48 uh hours.
Something along the line, is I'm not sure is the meeting over or is it not?
Or has it?
It's I'm getting conflicting reports here on the status of the meeting.
Regardless, I know what Obama wants out of this, and I know how he's going to try to position.
Whenever it's over, I know what they're going to try to say.
And then this Reuters also has a story.
And I've got this in the stack.
I'm going to get to all this stuff.
Reuters has a report out today that says despite all the claims of the country, the Treasury Department is preparing other options in case Congress doesn't raise the debt limit.
There is, you know, I've been making the point for how long, folks.
I mean, those of you who have been listening regularly will know it has to be weeks.
That there is no possibility of default.
The United States cannot possibly default.
There is revenue that comes in every day.
Tax revenue that comes in every day.
Companies are required to, individuals.
There are the withholding takes place every week.
There is revenue coming in to the Treasury sufficient to service the debt.
There is no default that's going down.
All of this is trumped up.
Please don't doubt me on this.
There's no bluster here.
It is the fact.
So what do the Republicans need to do?
Republicans need to stop talking about revenue and loopholes and all this.
The focus must be on this out-of-control spending.
Now I would love for the meeting not to have started yet, so that I could advise these people, because I know what to do.
I know what to tell them to do, and if they would listen, everything would be cool.
And I'm not saying that from an ego or braggadocious point of view.
Because I know who I'm dealing with here, folks, as do you.
We know we're dealing with Obama, the Democrats, we know we're dealing with the media and uh and liberals.
Okay.
Boehner made that statement after a briefing with Republicans this morning that there's maybe a 50-50 chance of a debt deal reached within 48 hours.
50-50 chance.
So they haven't made the deal yet.
Republicans need to stop, as I say, talking about revenue and loopholes and whatever, and keep the focus on all of this out-of-control spending.
If they're not careful, they will allow themselves to be positioned and sucked into the construct that Obama wants.
Now, there's a great analysis here.
National Review Online by James Capretta.
I have it here.
I'm going to read excerpts of it too, because it's very, very, very, very, very, very good.
And it's one of these pieces advising the Republicans of the pitfalls that they face.
I find it fascinating.
All of us on the conservative side think that our guys don't know what they're doing.
We have to advise them.
Yeah, why is that?
We think we got to warn them.
We think they actually go into these meetings not knowing what the traps are.
We we really do think that.
It's not just I El Rushbo, Mr. Capreta here writes from that standpoint at National Review Online.
But I know that I know Boehner and these guys, they they know the traps that we think.
We hope they do.
I guess it was now that we're not sure that they do.
Snerdley getting a big kick out of this.
So we the focus, of course, is cutting spending.
And we, by the way, um baseline budgeting, we need for the sake of this discussion for this meeting.
We need to route out the stimulus that because the stimulus is now serving as a baseline for every future budget.
That $800 billion that didn't accomplish, and now there's another report out about how really bad and wait till you hear that in three states, what it cost.
It's folks, it's outrageous.
It's just uh the the waste that was in that stimulus.
But anyway, it serves as a baseline.
But this is not a budget negotiation.
This is the thing.
Obama wants to pretend and he wants a big deal now, four trillion dollars in cuts over twelve years.
Isn't that a joke?
Cuts in 12 years, revenue increases immediately.
That's that's the problem.
That's what they did to George H.W. Bush.
Dick Darman fell for the trick that was put forth by George Mitchell.
You know, H.W. Bush, read my lips, no new taxes.
Darman, there was a deficit problem back there.
There's always a deficit problem.
Dick Darwin was uh Bush 41's big uh aides, and they were all caught up here as they got into re-election mode, they've got to do something about the deficit.
So Mitchell came along and and and basically said, Look, here's the deal.
We'll give you some spending cuts, but you gotta cut taxes first.
Okay, okay, and they cut the taxes, but there were never any spending cuts.
Same thing happened to Reagan.
This is why we think our guys don't know the traps.
The same thing happened to Reagan.
Reagan was promised in TEFRA, which was at the time the largest tax crease in American history is 1980 something.
He was promised two dollars of spending cuts for every new dollar in tax increase.
The spending cuts never happened.
They never do.
Obama's promising the same thing.
This is right out of the old Democrat playbook.
It's that old.
We've been here and done that.
They pulled it on Reagan in his second term.
They pulled it on Bush 41, who broke his no tax pledge.
Bush 41 fell for it, and it was voted out of office.
We know how this works.
We know how the scenario goes.
The Democrats are not going to feel bound to any promises they make to future cuts, let alone over 12 years when a bunch of them aren't even going to be around.
Ditto with health care.
You know, a lot of these old leather faces in the Democrat Party that signed Obamacare.
I don't care.
I'm going to be dead by the time this thing gets fully implemented.
It doesn't matter to me.
I'm going to benefit from the vote.
Brian, is that me from Apple?
Good.
It is or is not.
It is.
It's trackpads.
Um it's five magic trackpads.
In fact, I gotta take a break.
Let's open it up and see if that's well.
We'll get back to this here just a second.
Hey, welcome back, Rush Limbo behind the golden EIB microphone, serving humanity simply by being here.
Meeting is supposed to end about 1230.
Um, and then we'll know a little bit more before.
Now, here's a little bit more about the Republican meeting.
Before the Republicans went to the White House, Boehner told the GOP, taxes are off the table.
Just like I told you yesterday.
House Republicans are not going to raise taxes.
But he he does seem to be keeping some revenue increases on the table, according to Politico, at least.
Political reports speaker John Boehner told a closed meeting of the House Republican conference he was not going to provide them many details about his talks with President Obama on a debt ceiling increase, but said the tax increase are off the table even as he considers a variety of ways to increase revenue.
Now, given what Reuters did to Kyle yesterday, I'm reserving judgment until this is all over to see what, if anything that uh means.
Speaker said that it'll be clear within the next few days whether an agreement can be reached.
Whether or not it's possible depends on whether the White House insists on tax increases.
A Republican aide said.
So the Boehner meeting with the Republicans uh took place before the meeting with the Republicans up in the White House.
Now, This business of projecting, you know, coming up with it with a deal that cuts spending over 12 years but raises revenue right now.
Again, we've been there and done that.
It's a it's as old as a Democrat Party playbook, and it it's an it ought to be a non-starter.
They they ought not even advance beyond its proposal.
Reuters has a story, despite themselves.
It says the federal government takes in enough money every month to pay the debt service.
No possibility of default.
So how can it be said repeatedly without challenge that we will default on our debt if the debt ceiling is not raised?
We won't.
There is no magic drop dead date for default.
Please, folks, this is not bluster.
This is the truth.
What would happen is that debt services be paid, whatever's left, the net would be used to fund ongoing federal activities, which means Obama would prioritize what does or does not get funded, but we would not default.
You know, this is just me.
It frustrates me.
Folks, it's it's it's just me.
If you've got Obama, the Democrats, the media, all talking about increasing revenues as opposed to raising taxes.
And even Boehner, uh, according to Politico is drawing a distinction between the two.
Well, tax increases are off the table.
Well, we are looking for ways to enhance revenues and so forth.
They need to stop talking about revenues.
Why do we even have a debt limit?
This I just fear they're not approaching this right based on what I know.
Here's what they ought to be saying in this meeting.
And I know it's easy for us as outsiders to concoct all of this, but you go in there and you say, well, we are Congress.
You don't have the power to spend any money unless we authorize it first.
You don't.
And we are telling you that we are not funding this anymore.
We're not funding your agenda anymore.
We're not going to fund another dime.
Now it's up to you, Mr. President, to live within the budget that we give you.
Under the debt ceiling we give you.
Folks, even Britt Hume said that it's been a long time since a president was this weak, this powerless, this imperiled in Washington, D.C. You know it, and I know it.
The election we're held tomorrow, this guy goes down in flames in a major huge landslide.
Let me find this.
I thought I had it here at the top of my stand.
I know it's probably in there.
I'm probably turning.
Here it is.
This is I uh said this on Fox from unemployment to pretty much everything else.
Obama is failing in the job and failing to connect.
Britt Hume saw Obama's Twitter town hall as something amounting to a Potemkin village populated by straw men for the purpose of shoring up his sagging youth vote.
Wasn't a real town hall meeting with reel back and forth, was boring, transparently one-sided.
The most entertaining thing about it was watching or thinking about all the questions they were getting filtered away from the president.
But Britt Hume's opinion is that Obama is in as full a political retreat as this town has seen in years.
And he is.
And he is the one who could be forced to cave on this.
Now, I don't know.
Maybe respect for the office.
I gotta take a sip of something here to avoid uh belching just a second here, folks.
Maybe it's respect for the office or some such thing that it makes them want to be collegial and congenial about this, But you can go in there and be as polite as you want to be.
And you say, we are Congress.
And we are not raising taxes.
And we're not paying for this anymore.
We're not funding this anymore.
It's up to you, Mr. President, to live within the budget.
Under the debt ceiling that we give you.
You pay our bills, you'll cut other spending, and we'll ask that you did it in a way that adversely affects as few people as possible.
Now do it.
He got an opportunity talk to the guy.
This is what you say.
Obama is in as full a political retreat as this town has seen in years.
Nothing he's doing is working.
He can't point to anything and say we need to keep doing more of this.
So why are we even talking about doing more of it?
That's folks, as I say, it's just me, and I know it's not my job, and it's probably much harder than what it seems to me to do this.
I know armchair quarterbacking, easy to sit here, radio studio and go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You tell them and you tell them and you but it's uh to me it's politically smart, plus it's it's true.
I I I'm just there's a guy that gets let's go to the audio sound bites.
Mark Marco Rubio over in the Senate gets this.
He was uh the in Washington, Senate floor speech.
We have some sound bites from Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida.
Let's stop talking about new taxes and start talking about creating new taxpayers, which basically means jobs.
Now here in Washington, this debt is the number one issue on everyone's mind, and rightfully so, it is a major issue.
But everywhere else in the real world, the number one issue on people's minds are jobs.
And I'll tell you every other problem facing America: a mortgage crisis, home foreclosure crisis, this debt problem.
All of these issues get easier to deal with if people are gainfully employed across America.
And the impact that unemployment's having across this country is devastating.
And he wasn't finished, he was just getting warmed up.
Our job here is to do everything we can to make it easier for them to find a job, not harder.
And I think that's what we have to do when it comes to a balanced approach.
And when we talk about revenue, we don't need new taxes.
We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system, and then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again.
Amen.
There's a Republican here that gets it.
This is real simple, and this is all you say to Obama when you go into the meeting.
We need taxpayers.
You want to raise revenue?
Get some jobs out there.
Doomkoff.
New jobs, growing economy, more taxpayers, more revenue, bingo!
There it is.
Everybody's happy.
No need to raise a damn thing here.
And he kept going, folks.
So you look at all these taxes that are being proposed, and here's what I say.
I say we should analyze every single one of them through the lens of job creation.
Issue number one in America.
I want to know which one of these taxes that they're proposing will create jobs.
I want to know how many jobs are going to be created by the plane tax.
How many jobs are going to be created by the oil company tax that I heard so much about?
How many jobs are created by going after the millionaires and billionaires that the president talks about?
I want to know how many jobs do they create.
Marco Rubio, Republican freshman senator from Florida, definitely has a future, and here he is bringing it home.
I traveled to state of Florida for two years campaigning.
I have never met a job creator who told me that they were waiting for the next tax increase before they started growing their business.
I've never met a single job creator who's ever said to me, I can't wait till government raises taxes again so I can go out and create a job.
And I'm curious to know if they say that in New Hampshire, because they don't say that in Florida.
So my view on all this is I want to know how many jobs these tax increases the president proposes will create.
Because if they're not creating jobs and they're not creating new taxpayers, they're not solving the problem.
Republican senator from Florida.
Wow.
So, you know, we get enthused because we know that there are Republicans in there who get it, yet at the same time we do have this fear that some of them don't know the traps they're walking into At the same time.
When has a tax increase ever created a job?
Except for the IRS.
When has a tax ever created a job?
Yeah, Obama's got this favorite term.
We need to expand the pie.
The problem is he doesn't know how to do it.
Or he doesn't mean it when he says we need to expand the pie.
I mentioned a piece by James C. Capretta.
National Review Online.
Let me read some excerpts from this.
He's got the same point that they the Republicans hold all the cards.
I hate to keep saying I said yesterday, but I did.
Obama is the one can be made to cave here.
He's got nothing, folks.
He's got nothing.
It's a total win win for the Republicans to hold firm on this.
And they need to remember this read my lips business, and they need to remember all these times in the past where massive cuts in spending were promised way down the road in years we can't even see.
yet the tax increases right now it never works Mr. Capretto, as the debt ceiling showdown heads into its final stages, the political maneuvering has intensified with both sides seeking to gain the upper hand in the PR war.
The leaders from both parties know stakes in this fight are very, very high.
Confrontations of this sort tend to become defining moments in political life for good or ill.
And at this stage, any time that he wrote this, anything could happen.
Many scenarios still in play, but for Republicans, there are reasons to worry that this showdown could be headed toward a political and fiscal debacle if they're not careful.
It wouldn't be the first time the Democrats got the better of the Republicans in a budget fight.
And here he recounts 1990.
Richard Darman, who was Bush 41's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wanted to strike a budget deal to bring projected budget deficits down by 500 billion dollars over five years.
As a precondition for even talking about it, though, the Senate majority leader George Mitchell, a Democrat, who was the most partisan man in Washington at the time, demanded that Bush 41 reneg in writing on his no new taxes pledge.
And he did.
The president did so at Darman's urging, and from that moment on, the president's standing and leverage plummeted at crucial moments in the ensuing process.
The tax increases kept getting bigger and more onerous.
The spending cuts and entitlement reforms kept getting more ephemeral.
In the end, it was just a question of how bad the political fallout would be for the president.
We all know it was very bad indeed.
Now in the current fight, it's quite clear what Obama and his allies are trying to accomplish.
First, they want a package upon which the president can campaign in 2012.
Something on the order of a three trillion dollar deficit cutting program, no matter how phony.
It would help the president downplay the big spending liberal image that most independent voters now have of it.
If he can come along and say, guess what I engineered here?
Two, three trillion dollars deficit reduction.
I did it.
Second, the president wants to raise taxes without getting blamed for it, hence the disingenuous uh cat and mouse games aimed at luring Republicans into accepting tax increases behind closed doors so the president never actually has to take ownership of them before they become law.
Third and most important, the Democrats want a deal that does not give an inch on what really matters to their voting base.
That's the entitlement status quo.
The Democrat Party has come to define itself as the party of entitlements, the New Deal, the Great Society, the war on poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, nothing gets a Democrat heart beating quite like ensnaring the entire American middle class in entitlement dependence.
For Democrats, victory means forcing Republicans to accept a budget framework that leaves today's entitlement superstructure exactly as it is.
To further that goal, the president and his allies are playing a familiar card.
It's not that they're against entitlement reform.
They say no, no, no.
It's just they want to protect the beneficiaries from any financial sacrifice.
And so we learn in recent days.
Quote unquote on the table.
Among the changes that are reportedly under consideration are further reductions in what providers of services and products are made, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And apparently, Mr. Capretta says that some Republicans are willing to play along with it, which doesn't surprise me that there are some Republicans who think there's a way to go out and grab independence.
Now, these kinds of changes to Medicare, Medicaid are nothing new.
Various versions of them have been included in every budget deal of 30 years.
Most especially of the bipartisan deals of 90 and 97.
They don't constitute genuine entitlement reform.
They won't fix Medicare or Medicaid.
They'll not solve the nation's budget problems.
Now I'm going to take calls about this subject as the program unfolds, but there's lots of stuff.
When I get in the next hour, I'm moving on to other things.
We got that school cheating scandal going on in Atlanta.
We can't let that go by this fast and furious thing, folks.
We're talking about a potential impeachable offense here with the selling of guns to Mexico.
Wait a little here to lay this on this.
A lot here still to do, but uh as we stay on this for the to finish this hour, to show you what I mean about the Obama window dressing is a very telling paragraph buried in a Washington Post article today.
In debt talks, Obama offers Social Security cuts.
It's by the famous Laurie Montgomery.
President Obama, listen to this now, this is very, very important.
President Obama pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.
Now, here is what's buried down at the bottom of the story.
Privately, some congressional Democrats were alarmed by the President's proposal, which would include adjusting the measure of inflation used to determine Social Security payouts, but others described it as primarily a bargaining strategy intended to demonstrate Obama's willingness to compromise and highlight the Republican refusal to raise taxes.
In other words, Obama's proposed Social Security and Medicare cuts are all for show.
He knows the Republicans aren't going to go along with tax increases.
So and he thinks he thinks enough of the country is with him on tax increases on millionaires.
That if he can pigeonhole the Republicans into opposing them and stop even for their precious entitlement reform, they've got a winner.
That's so the substance of all of this is not even of concern to Obama.
This is just um it's just all for show.
This morning, Capitol Hill John Boehner, Audio Sum by 7 here, Mike, I'm skipping six.
Reporter said to Boehner, uh Speaker Boehner, you agree with the uh the view here that their uh loophole closures should be offset with tax cuts elsewhere in the tax code, tax increases.
Well, what are your thoughts here?
We are not interested in raising taxes on the American people.
That's what Democrats are demanding as part of this deal.
How are you going to reach a deal?
They want new revenue.
There's a lot of conversation that's underway.
But we believe that spending is the problem.
And we've got to get our spending, both in the short term and the long term, under control.
We know that the entitlement programs are important programs for tens of millions of Americans.
But we also know that if they're not reformed, that they won't exist in the future.
Right.
So it all sounds good outside the meeting.
We'll find out afterwards how it all went down.
One other thing on this when we get back.
And then I'm start taking your calls on it.
We'll move on.
Uh Obama is banking on the hope that people are too stupid to distinguish the the difference between debt and deficits.
And I don't and this I'm not talking about the national debt here, which is the accumulation of deficits.
I'm talking about the debt we're we're discussing here in this in this deal.
He's counting on people being too stupid to understand the difference.
So I will splain this in my own inimitable fashion when we come back.
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