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July 14, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:45
July 14, 2011, Thursday, Hour #2
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Time Text
And we are back.
You know, the British Open started today, and I didn't even know it.
I'm reading the paper on the website.
Actually, I'm reading the New York Post, padding around doing some show prep.
I said, click here for open scores.
Oh, and I looked, I go, July 14th about time for British show.
Could it possibly be?
So I clicked on it, and yep.
Started today, and I didn't even know it.
And I'm heading off to an annual member guest golf tournament this afternoon.
I didn't even know.
That's how focused I, El Rushbo, have been.
Happy to have you with us, ladies and gentlemen.
Telephone number if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, the email address El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
John Boehner said dealing with the White House has been like dealing with Jell-O.
In a meeting with a small group of reporters in his Capitol Hill orifice yesterday morning, he criticized Obama, White House officials, for their lack of resolve in negotiations.
Dealing with them last couple of months been like dealing with Jell-O.
Some days it's firmer than others.
Sometimes it's like they left it all overnight.
Boehner explained that talks broke down over the weekend because he said the president backed off entitlement reform so much from Friday to Saturday.
It was Jell-O.
It was damn near liquid.
We can't count on what the guy says.
What he says doesn't have any lifespan to it.
He'll say something, and then the next time we talk, it's like he never said it.
You know, once when I was in negotiations early on in my career, when I'd never done it, it was my first time negotiating a contract rather than just being hired.
It was at a radio station.
And I had, for the first time in my life, some leverage.
I didn't realize how much, but I had a lot.
So I didn't have an agent.
I don't have an agent now.
Did it all on my own and figured why, I don't want to get into why no agent.
I just didn't have an agent.
Decided to do it myself.
I do everything myself.
So a session is scheduled after we've had three or four meetings in the boss's office for 7.30 in the morning.
The program started at 9.
So I walked back to the meeting.
He said, what are you doing here?
Well, I'm here for a negotiation.
Not a meeting.
What are you talking about?
You losing your mind?
We've got nothing to talk about today.
So I walked out of there.
Called some people and said, it's a standard tactic.
This is a standard tactic.
You're just learning.
So that's what Boehner's saying it's like with Obama.
I mean, they'll agree to have some measure of entitlement reform, or at least some of it will be on the table.
And the next time they meet, it's like they never talked about it.
It's like Jell-O.
This is the only thing they've been firm on in these damn tax increases, Boehner said.
The speaker also made it clear that he believes the president waited too long to get personally involved.
When he phoned the president last Saturday to give him the bad news about talks breaking down, Obama seemed surprised but not shocked, Boehner said.
Phone call lasted 35 to 40 minutes.
Boehner said that the tax increases that Obama's been pushing As part of what the president calls a balanced package, can't make it through Congress.
What the president is asking us to do just won't pass.
He said that he believes the public supports the Republican line in the sand.
The American people want us to hang tough.
They do.
There's a Rasmussen poll out today.
What is it?
55% of the American people agree with the Republican position on this.
Yet the Republicans remain very nervous that they ultimately are going to end up being blamed because that's just the way things always have worked out.
Jobless claims announced today to be 405,000.
That was seen as good news in that the experts expected 415,000 jobless claims.
But don't get too excited about 405,000 jobless claims.
It's still a weak number.
This is like 30 weeks in a row.
They've been over 400,000.
But the real news in the labor report published today, we predicted this last week.
Last week's claims number was revised upward by 9,000.
Last week, on this very day, the reported number for jobless claims was 418,000.
We said, but that number doesn't really mean anything because it's going to be revised upwards.
They all are.
Well, today it was to 427,000.
So they actually missed on the low side by 9,000 last week.
It makes a four-week moving average of 423,800 jobless claims.
The economy has not turned any corners.
There is no recovery.
It's Obama's economy, and Obama needs the Republicans to save him from himself.
Obama needs the Republicans to get reelected.
Obama needs the Republicans to cave.
What color is yellow?
Red.
What other color could he be talking about?
Certainly wanted to know what color jello Boehner was talking about than Obama's.
It's red jello.
806 days, ladies and gentlemen, since Senate Democrats, and they run the place, have passed a budget.
There are 365 days in a year.
So well over two years since the Democrats who run the place have passed a budget.
The law requires them to pass a budget every year.
806 days in counting.
And this, by the way, is the strategy.
There's no question.
They devised two years ago strategy.
We're not going to present a budget.
We're not going to tie ourselves.
Now, this was part of the 2010 reelection strategy.
Don't put a budget out there because we don't want voters to have any specifics about what we intend.
So they didn't.
Now the strategy remains implemented so that they don't have to tie themselves to any of their own numbers specifically.
So while they have no numbers, they have no budget.
Obama hasn't presented one either.
The Republicans do.
The Republicans are acting like the adults.
The Republicans are presenting plans.
Say what you want about some of them, but the Republicans have ideas with numbers designed to seriously address the problem and fix it.
Start down the road of fixing it.
The Democrats, as a strategy, do not for the sole purpose of doing nothing but assaulting the Republicans for the numbers that they present.
In so doing, the Democrats have a free road in claiming that they want senior citizens to die and the sick people to die and all this, because the Democrats don't have any numbers.
They have no specifics.
They have no budget, nor does Obama, other than this monstrosity from last February with a $3.7 trillion budget that not even one Democrat voted for.
Other than that, they don't have one on purpose so that the only numbers out there are Republican numbers that they can demagogue.
That's the strategy.
So if Senate Democrats don't have to project spending and revenues, if they can just choose not to in violation of the law, then why should I have to pay quarterly taxes?
Why do I have to go to the trouble to project and pay taxes to the government based on my estimated taxable income, which I have to do every three months?
And actually, the second quarter is actually a beast because you got to do it in two months.
You got to do it April 15th and then back in June.
Now, in a sense, quarterly taxes like budgets are an estimate.
They are a projection of taxable income.
How about I just publish it once a year?
Maybe every two years.
How about I don't estimate my income for two years?
How about I don't project anything and therefore I don't pay anything for just two years, maybe three.
Sure, law says I'm supposed to make that estimate and payment every quarter, but so what?
The Senate Democrats aren't following the law.
Why should anybody else?
Yeah, I know.
They'll put me in the cell next to Matt Off or Wesley Snipes or somebody if I don't exactly.
Now, maybe we need to ask why are the Senate Democrats above the law?
And why doesn't the media care?
I'll tell you why the media doesn't care because they marvel at the strategy.
They just love the strategy.
Well, look at how smart these Democrats are.
Don't present a budget.
Make the onus on the Republicans.
Only numbers out there are Republican numbers.
Of course, you can rip them to shreds all you want.
The last thing you're going to do is agree with any of them.
Moody's Investor Service said late yesterday it placed the U.S. government's AAA bond rating on review for possible downgrade due to rising risk of default.
The review of the U.S. government's bond rating is prompted by the possibility that the debt limit will not be raised in time to prevent a missed payment of interest or principal on outstanding bonds and notes.
That, folks, we gave you the numbers on this yesterday.
It's not possible to miss a payment unless somebody doesn't make it, which that falls to Obama.
We have the money there.
Moody's, or as Stuart Varney at Fox says, Moody's.
And Stuart Varney, I was listening to him this morning.
In fact, he's very worried about this.
You know, Stuart's a good guy, but he's very, very worried about this.
If we miss one payment, then we are in a world of total humiliation, embarrassment.
If we miss one, here's what you know, the American people need to ask themselves a question.
The question, we elect Barack Hussein Obama, and two and a half years later, we find ourselves on the verge of budgetary default.
We elect Barack Hussein Obama president two and a half years.
We are on the verge of an unprecedented U.S. default With worldwide first time ever humiliation, embarrassment, whatever else would a company default.
No other president has ever brought us anywhere near anything like this.
And yet, blame it on the Republicans.
Blame it on the Republicans.
Democrats in Congress ignoring another law, a law Obama demanded and they all wanted, and that's PAYGO.
They just laugh when anybody brings it up like Jim Bunning did.
PAYGO.
They just pay as you go.
You don't pay for anything you don't have.
The current U.S. debt is larger than the entire economy of China in two and a half years of Barack Hussein Obama.
And by the way, in two and a half years, this country's approval ratings in the Arab world are near an all-time low.
Now, how can that be?
Remember, just by virtue of the fact of our president's middle name, we were supposed to be loved and adored and appreciated.
It was going to be a new world out there.
The Arab world was going to love us.
They're going to stop terrorizing us.
They're going to stop throwing suicide bombers at us.
They were going to love us, all this.
And Obama goes and makes a Cairo speech.
How can any of this be in two and a half years, this utter, total, near destruction of our country in two and a half years?
Really, it's scary to realize that's all it's taken is two and a half years.
And by the way, lest we forget on this Moodis business, Congress tightened its regulation of credit ratings companies last year with the so-called Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Consumer Protection Act.
Yes, that Wall Street, that financial regulatory reform bill included in it regulation of credit rating companies like Moodis.
So these companies, like Moodis, know which side of the bread their butter is on.
They realize that they now have to toe the line and advance the interests of the Democrat Party.
Bill Hammer today on Fox asked Stuart Varney, look, Stuart, are these guys totally objective?
Stuart Varney said, they say they are.
They say they are, and we have to take them at their word.
It was clear to me that to Stuart Varney, Moodis is the gold standard, that they're God.
They're the absolute truth.
They don't lie.
They don't make it up.
But all I know is that they are now regulated under the Financial Regulatory Reform Act.
And that tells me they know what they have to do to stay safe.
And that's advance the interests of the Democrat Party.
But still, again, just think about it.
Obama is elected president a mere two and a half years later.
Mudis is talking about the possibility of the United States defaulting on our debt.
Aside from the fact that it's really a coincidence, does anybody really, I mean, how in the world does anybody even talk about this guy seriously getting reelected?
And we're back.
We're going to go to the phones here, but one more thing here, just about Obama and this Arab business.
In truth, Obama's not Arab.
His father was Kenyan.
So this idea that there's going to be some special bond with the Arab world was always a farce.
It was just more of the farce that was Obama and the media and the image makers.
So Moody's, if they're aligned with the Democrats, what are they saying?
They're saying that we should continue to spend and print and borrow.
Is that the credit advice Moody's is giving?
Is that how Moody's wants to be known?
They want to take themselves seriously as a credit rating agency.
So for us to stay solvent, continue to do more and more that's brought us to the brink of disaster.
Is that what Moody's is saying?
Perhaps, how do we know that Moody's is not concerned about Obama and the Democrats?
Why do we always assume Moody's is worried about the Republicans?
The Republicans are actually trying to get the fiscal house in order.
Even these idiots at Moody's can see that.
Maybe Moody is actually aiming their comments at Obama.
It would make economic sense.
Okay, so the president is saying that he is giving the Republicans until tomorrow to have the general outlines of some deal.
Republicans have until tomorrow.
And I'm not going to be here tomorrow, so I got to do something because I and I am the titular head of the Republican Party by their own claim.
According to Obama's own people, I am ordering the president to present his spending cuts to the American people by tomorrow.
And while I'm at it, I'm ordering Harry Reid to propose a budget in the Senate for the first time in two and a half years.
Fine.
The president said he's giving the Republicans until tomorrow to have the general outlines of some deal.
Well, I run the Republican Party.
They've said so.
So in my role as head of the Republican Party, here it is.
I am ordering the president to present his spending cuts, not just to the Republicans in a meeting, but to the American people in total by tomorrow.
While I'm playing golf, by the way, finally, somebody in our party is going to be playing golf while he's working.
And it's going to be me playing golf.
That's the official position of the Republican Party as of now.
I'm on the golf course tomorrow.
He will present his spending cuts to the American people by tomorrow.
And I am ordering the Democrats and Harry Reid to propose a budget in the Senate for the first time in two and a half years.
And I am ordering Obama to put Obamacare on the table and throw Biden out of the negotiations.
Yes, I'm serious.
He wants to sit here and issue ultimatums now when he said that we had to drop our, you know, not drop our ultimatums at the door.
Okay, fine.
He's giving the Republicans until tomorrow to have the general outlines of some deal.
I'm sorry, we've got more than the general outlines of some deal.
We have the specifics.
And he knows what they are.
They have been presented to him.
He himself has said, I am the titular head of the GOP.
So one final time.
I'm playing golf tomorrow.
And Saturday and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday, he's working.
I'll send Boehner and the boys up there.
That's fine.
I'm going to be in the golf course.
Obama must present to the American people his spending cuts by tomorrow.
And Harry Reid must present a budget by the Senate Democrats, first time in two and a half years.
Put Obamacare on the table and kick Biden out of the talks.
It's Rush Limbaugh, open line Friday on Thursday, and we start on the phones today.
Where?
Seattle.
Anya, great to have you with us.
Hi.
Hi, Major Ditto's from the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Thank you very much.
My point was that I agree with Senator McConnell that, gosh, it's going to be really almost, didn't he say it was going to be impossible to reason with him at some point?
He made that statement.
He said it's going to be impossible to discuss things with President Obama because I think we're not only dealing with a debt issue, but a worldview issue.
President Obama, I think, essentially believes that it's his job, in his job description, to make things fair.
Where I just don't know what universe he's living in.
I mean, things cannot be fair.
So how can you reason with this guy?
No, no.
You can't.
And remember, he doesn't expect things to be fair.
That's just language designed to impress certain voters.
And they may want to pretend that they can actually equalize outcomes.
They can't do that.
What they really want to do is make people think that they're going to go after the high achievers on the pretext the high achievers are cheaters and they have what they have because they've stolen it, come by it dishonestly.
It's not fair that somebody should have so much while so many have so little.
He's just playing class warfare politics, the rhetoric.
He wants people to think it's going to be to ask the people that voted for him two and a half years ago just how all this fairness is working out for him and ask them how their lives have improved.
Do they have the new kitchen that they thought they're going to get?
Do they have the new car they thought they were going to get?
Is Warren Buffett sleeping in the gutter?
Yeah, exactly.
You know, my husband's a medical doctor, and he actually came out of a meeting last night where he works for a big health system.
And they said, you know what?
For the first time, they are laying off 350 employees out of their health system.
And I said to him, I said, well, I said, Sweeney, what if somebody else gets elected?
Oh, no.
The state's got money because they're cutting off money to Medicare recipients.
I mean, the medical industry, I'm not saying doctors are getting laid off.
I really don't know that because I'm not in those meetings.
But it is unbelievable.
It has affected people right now.
Absolutely right now.
I know it is.
I think there's so many misconceptions out there and there's so much BS.
I'm telling you, Anya, if the election were tomorrow, Obama loses in a landslide.
There's no doubt about it.
This is a disaster.
There is nothing worth redeeming in this administration.
There's nothing that's happened that anybody in their right mind says give us more of it, much less four more years of it.
But it takes a lot to get to that realization because it seems to be such in contrast to the conventional wisdom is that Obama's doing the best he can.
He was presented to worse problem by Bush.
He's a nice, smart guy.
He really cares about us.
He wants everybody to do well.
He's mean Republicans.
I mean, that's what's out there.
The truth of the matter is we got a one-man wrecking bull here who can't even keep his own economic staff on the payroll.
And I think he's cracking cracking.
This is not this narcissism bit, this there's a screw loose there.
This is not normal.
None of this is.
But it's our reality.
I'm going to go ahead and send the boys up there, Boehner and Du Bois.
I'm going to send them up there for the meeting tomorrow while I'm on the golf course.
But the demand is, because he's, again, the president is giving us until tomorrow to produce the general outlines of some deal after we've presented specific ideas.
Okay, so now here's this demand from the White House.
He's given us until tomorrow to have the general outlines of a deal.
Well, now, I run this show.
You know, I'm titular head of the Republican Party.
I'm the guy.
I'm going to send Boehner and Du Bois up there, but there's the demand.
The demand is that the president present his spending cuts to the American people, not just to Boehner and Du Bois, but to the American people.
And Dingy Harry presented budget for the first time in two and a half years.
And I'm also demanding that Obama put his health care plan on the table to be talked about as an entitlement that deserves to be reformed or repealed.
And I'm also going to ask that Biden be thrown out of the meeting.
He's petulant.
He doesn't contribute anything, doesn't add anything to it, and he ought not to be there.
He's a child.
Michael in Huntington Beach, California, welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
Hey, Rush.
Second time caller Ditto's plus a drive-by call.
Thank you, sir.
Hey, Rush, I was thinking you let off the show and said that Moody's is helping the Democrats out, which I agree with you.
But also, why should anybody listen to Moody's, Morningstar, all these rating agencies completely blew it on the subprime mortgage debacle?
So I think their credibility is blown out of the water.
Moody's did miss.
They missed the housing meltdown.
They missed the subsequent financial collapse.
Some people say they missed it intentionally.
I don't know.
I never heard that, but yeah, it could be.
Yeah, they did.
They didn't call any of that.
And now here they are claiming that we've got to do this and that real quick or we're going to lose our credit rating, whatever it is.
But we've got to hold out.
They could be also talking about Obama.
They could be more concerned about Obama and his lack of leadership in the negotiations.
It might, you know, our knee-jerk reaction is they blame the Republicans and likely, but they might, they might, look, the Republicans are the ones trying to deal with this.
Yeah, I agree.
Stan got to stand tough.
Right?
Hey, Rush.
Yeah.
Hey, one thing.
I want to say hello to my friend Rich Plumber Rich.
I didn't say hi to him last time I called.
And one other thing before I go, have a great golf vacation, okay?
And keep up the good work.
All right, cool.
Well, you did it.
It's done.
Happy you did.
Gil in Philadelphia as we move on.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi.
Hello, Rush.
19 times.
Gig a dit out.
Thank you, sir.
I've been running my own business for many years, and I've been through two economic cycles during that time.
And I can tell you that nothing is more difficult when your revenues don't equal your expenditures.
But what you do is you get up in the morning, you look in the mirror, you ask yourself, what did I do wrong?
And where do I have to go from here?
It's called accountability.
And the first thing you do is you lay people off.
You don't get to tell the marketplace, oh, I need more money.
I'm raising my fees in a capricious manner.
You live with the hand you're dealt.
This is our greatest opportunity for the first time in my lifetime to actually hold the government accountable in the same way the free market holds the people in the marketplace accountable every single day.
Couldn't agree with you more.
But you see, you're running up here against the reality, and that is government is God.
Government is government comes first.
Government never must do without.
All money is governments.
Obama believes that.
All money is governments.
What you end up with is simply what they have decided not to spend.
And that's the way Obama looks at it.
And that's the way Susan Feinberg, who's that economics professor at Princeton, looks at it.
Last week, she's at a birthday dinner at Beast Robes in D.C., and she sees Paul Ryan with two friends having dinner, and they're drinking a bottle of wine.
She looks at the label, sees what it is, looks it up on the wine list, finds out the bottle costs $350.
She drank by her own admission, because she called a blog called Talking Points Memo to report this.
She had a bottle and a half of her own, whatever it was, $80 a bottle of wine.
She got up on her way out, walked over to Ryan, and gave him the business.
How dare he, how dare he make a point of buying a $350 bottle of wine?
How dare he?
Well, what business is it of hers?
It was their own money.
And Talking Points Memo starts this big riff about lobby laws being violated, and there weren't any lobbyists at the dinner.
It was Ryan with two economists, and they were using their own money.
But if that would have been Pelosi and her family, and the bottle of wine had been $5,000, Feinberg wouldn't have said a thing, because whatever government spends is fine.
But you spending your own money on a $350 bottle of wine.
Well, that's just insensitive, and that shouldn't be permitted.
That should not be permitted.
And I got to take a break.
Sit tight.
We'll be back after this.
Don't go away.
You know, I'm holding here in my formerly nicotine stained fingers a story from McClatchy.
Kevin G. Hall wrote the thing April 12th of 2010, how Moody's sold its ratings and sold out investors.
April 12th, 2010, as the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's investor service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted,
responded to the housing market collapse by purging analysts, i.e. firing them, and executives who warned of trouble and instead promoted those executives who helped Wall Street plunge the company into its worst financial crisis since the Depression.
A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.
Instead, Moody's promoted executives who headed its structured finance division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors.
These are the pools of mortgages, the mortgage-backed securities, which were worthless.
It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that were soon downgraded to junk.
Such products have another name now, toxic assets.
The point is that the McClatchy investigation found that Moody's purposely avoided rating the worthless stuff, thereby continuing a notion investors could feel free to invest in it.
They got rid of executives who sounded the warning bell about this, and they promoted executives who did the opposite.
They sold its ratings.
They sold out investors, according to McClatchy.
April of 2010 is the date of the story.
Here's Rick in Melbourne, Florida.
Hello, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hello, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Great to talk to you, sir.
You bet, sir.
You mentioned something that I've been wondering for a while now, and that's why isn't and why hasn't Obamacare been on the table?
It seems like the perfect time, even if that were the only thing that we got out of this particular August 2nd date, is Obamacare is repealed.
We'll extend the debt limit to fund the government through, say, October when we're supposed to have a budget, and we need some more time to work out a real budget.
Yeah, well, let me tell you, you repeal Obamacare and a bunch of the temporary emergencies go away.
Long term, nothing's solved with it.
You get rid of Obamacare, and you got all kinds of breathing room.
You've got no more panic whatsoever.
Now, as to why the Republicans don't officially present it, I don't know.
My guess would be that they go in there and they tell Obama, okay, we're not talking about this unless Obamacare is on the table.
I think they know that that's a non-starter.
They're going to have to get rid of Obamacare without him.
They know that.
He's not going to go along with getting rid of his health care.
I mean, that's his signature, whatever the hell it is.
I mean, that's the wrecking ball.
Right.
He's not going to want to go along with it.
But if it was boiled down to those simple terms, get rid of Obamacare and the debt ceiling, we get relief on that, more time to work on it or not.
Well, you know, President, you choose.
Is it America or is it Obamacare, which is more important?
Well, I just said, you know, I'm sending Boehner Du Bois up there tomorrow with that.
Since we've got this demand to show up up there with our plan tomorrow, that's what the White House has done.
I'm going to send Boehner Du Bois up there.
And my instructions are: okay, Obamacare is on the table for being discussed and repealed.
I appreciate you doing that, right?
Now, somebody has to do it, and I'm doing it now because I'm going to be in the golf course tomorrow while everybody else is working on this.
Now, there are some people.
I got some emails here.
There are some people who are really worried that if I'm leaving, that they're going to cave and a horrible deal is about to be made.
If I thought my leaving was going to cause that, I wouldn't leave.
I'd come up with a fake medical excuse or something.
Don't worry about it.
There are going to be plenty of people around, I've seen to it, that are going to hold their feet to the fire on this.
July 22nd is a, well, they say, yeah, to pass it to both houses, July 22nd.
But really, they're out there with the date of August the 2nd.
Another thing, folks, don't forget, Ramadan starts August 1st.
Obama's birthday is August 3rd.
And right in the middle of those two dates, we're told August 2nd, you figure it out.
And by the way, are those of you worried that my being gone tomorrow will remove pressure from the Republicans?
They'll be more likely to came with a bad deal.
Look, EIB1 stands by at all times when I'm away.
Within moments, we can be airborne and headed to the site of the emergency or wherever we need to be.
So, well, Obama's birthday is actually the 4th, but he's going to start partying on the 3rd.
I see, okay, fundraising.
He had to get a special dispensation for that, by the way, because Ramadan starts August the 1st.
Okay, let me take a brief time out here, my friends.
I told you when we started the program, three hours of broadcast excellence are going to seem like 10 minutes when it was all over.
We've been talking about books, novels, and so forth that I have been reading lately this week, and I need to add another one.
Laura Ingram's new book of The I Zing.
This is a book that's targeted at what's going wrong in the American culture.
And it's, while serious, there's a lot of very funny and humorous, good, cheerful ways of dealing with it, perhaps stopping it and reversing it.
It's a fun read, too.
Great cover.
Looks like the label on my bottle of tea, by the way, in a little bit.
It does.
Laura Ingram of the IZing.
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