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July 20, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:47
July 20, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast.
Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill seekers, conversationalists all across the fruited plane.
Somebody asked me today, how does it feel?
Come back after being gone six days and everything essentially the same.
And except for one minor thing, and that is the House vote last night on cat cup and balance.
Cut cap and balance.
We're still where we are when I left, which folks, believe me, is progress.
I can't tell you in the old days.
If I had split the scene for this long in a period of time like this, our side would have caved.
And they didn't cave when I was gone.
I'm telling you, there's reason for optimism here.
There's reason for hope.
Now we're down to the wire, and it's it's uh it's it's it's it's by no means any less tense.
The Republicans are no less nervous than they were when I left, perhaps even more so.
They're even more nervous now, but they're hanging tough.
They're even the AP or politico.
Politico has a story today.
Those damn Republican conservatives, who do they think they are?
They dare to sit there and continue to say that they won't support any tax increases.
Who do they think they are?
So they're hanging tough in there.
And we'll do our best, as uh I'm sure you've been doing in my absence to uh keep things uh uh alive, as they are in terms of what I think more and more people are now looking at as genuinely saving the country.
That's really what's at stake here.
I don't care about all the previous debt limit increases.
I don't care about because the country wasn't on the brink then.
We didn't have and by the way, this 14.3 trillion dollar national debt, we've blown by that.
It's already sixteen.
That's what raising a debt limit means.
They want to take the national debt to sixteen trillion dollars before the next election.
That's what raising the debt limit means.
And Moody's.
Or is my friend Stuart Varney says Moodis.
Moody's is out there.
They must have been listening to me.
They're saying, the hell with the debt limit, just get rid of it.
Moody's has said, why even have one?
Just get rid of the thing.
And of course, uh it it in a in a strict logical sense.
What is the debt limit if not all it is now is a political chaos opportunity for the Democrat Party.
It's all it is.
You know, last time, well, not the last time, but a couple times, three times ago, whatever it was, 2006.
Back we know everybody talked about Obama voted for or voted against raising it.
He wasn't the only one.
Every Democrat, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, all these guys voted against raising it, was the most irresponsible thing we could do.
This is not about anything other than a political opportunity to create chaos to continue the notion that this country is going to be transformed into nothing but a big government tax increase, redistribute the wealth until the country's finished.
Program, which is what Obama's um Obama's plan is.
It's patently obvious.
And even as we sit here today.
After I have been absent for six days, it is truly amazing.
Obama has offered nothing.
There is still not one word, one letter of the alphabet of specificity from Obama.
Not one element of a plan.
He has not identified anything.
He's just sitting up there refereeing all of this.
Nothing's, and he's getting away with it.
The debt ceiling.
We ought to call it the debt suggestion.
Because that's all this is.
And we'll blow through this in another year and a half.
More and more Republicans, uh, at least in the House figuring this out, but we got this gang of six now.
And whenever you have these gangs pop up, there's one way to understand it.
All you have to know about any gang of, and that is Rhino Republicans have decided to fold in with liberal Democrats in the name of compromise or whatever it is that will elevate them above the fray so that they can appear to be reasonable adults or what have you.
Spineless.
Well, I wouldn't say spineless, but uh certainly spines of linguini.
And interestingly, the gang of six option raises taxes.
Trillion dollars with a five hundred billion dollar down payment on spending cuts.
500 billion.
That's a quarter.
Do you use quarters anymore?
Do you run around with pocket change, snurdly?
I don't.
I I can't tell you, and I'm being honest here if I always am.
I can't tell you the last time I had change in my pocket.
But 500 billion dollars is like a quarter.
Well, what's so funny?
Wait, no, I don't get change.
I don't take change.
I don't get, but I don't, and I know.
What what's going to the mall have to do with it?
Well what.
Oh, there's plenty of places I go where they're cash transactions.
There's plenty of places I go with cash transactions, but I it's not that the mall isn't uh let me think.
Where was the last place?
No, uh uh uh no cash transacted golf course except when you tip the caddy.
And you generally, I know some tightwads that ask for change from caddies, but I don't.
Uh see.
Uh you have to have quarters for the parking leaders in Palm Beach.
I don't.
I I I don't I don't park.
Okay, I see what you're talking about here.
I don't park.
I get dropped off or I send somebody.
Okay.
But the point is, for those of you who still carry change, $500 billion down payment spending cuts is like a quarter in terms of our 14, it's probably not even that much.
When I was gone, I heard the story of a guy, and I I don't remember his name.
I don't think it was a uh nationally known worldwide famous name, but somebody back in 1930, depression, down to his last 10 million committed suicide because he was down to his last 10 million.
So I wonder, well, what was 10 million worth back in 1930?
So I got out my trusty calculator that calculates the inflation rate.
You know what?
10 million dollars in 1930 was the equivalent of 135 million dollars today.
So essentially a guy in 1930 committed suicide because he was down to his last 135 million dollars in terms of 1930 spending power.
That's what 10 million got you back then.
This interesting thing is that we pick up along the way.
Folks, before oh, and they're playing games with us on this heat wave again.
Even Drudge, Drudge getting sucked in here, gonna be 116 in Washington.
No, it's not.
It's gonna be like 100, maybe 99, the heat index manufactured by the government to tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there.
116.
When's the last time the heat index was reported as an actual temperature?
It hasn't been, but it looks like they're trying to get away with doing that now.
16 now, Drudge is just linking to other people reporting.
That's it.
He's not saying it.
I don't want to misunderstand, but he's linking the stories which say 116 degrees in Washington.
No, it's what, 1979?
It's gonna top out of 102, 103.
It does this every year.
We have this this there's a heat dome over uh half the country.
The Midwest is moving east.
And it happens every summer.
Every summer.
Oh, if we if we want to cool things off, please, Al Gore, schedule a global warming conference uh wherever in Washington.
Go there.
You want that 103, 116 to get normal, it will, within an hour of Gore announcing that he's going.
Another 10 degrees off when he shows up, plus hail and rain, and maybe some high winds to really cool people off.
That's all that has to happen.
Before we get into all of this in great detail.
I um start the program today with a um really heavy heart, somber, somber mood.
Uh just forty-five minutes ago, uh received an email that Myra Hyatt Kraft had passed away earlier this morning from cancer.
She's the wife of Robert Kraft, and they together owned the New England Patriots.
But beyond that, they were perhaps Boston's most prolific philanthropic uh family and corporate endeavor.
Uh they just Robert Kraft and his wife Myra are truly uh great people, and Catherine and I, you know, you you go through life, you know, one of the great things, and I've said many times that perhaps the most wonderful thing that's happened to me as a product of my own degree of success here is the people that has afforded me the opportunity to meet.
I have really been blessed in meeting a variety of people who are the best at what they do in every regard.
And the crafts the best at what they do, the best at philanthropy, they uh one of the most respected uh ownership groups in National Football League, and uh in other sports endeavors and and in in their other corporate uh uh entities.
You know, we got to know the crafts uh over the last number of years, and they became dear friends.
And we knew that Mrs. Kraft was was not well, that she had uh had cancer previously and thought that it had been eradicated and on a goodwill mission to Israel this past spring, it surfaced again and this morning she passed away, and I we we're we're both grief-stricken.
It is helpless.
You cannot uh do anything.
There's no words that comfort anybody in a situation like this, but you still have to say something because you want to.
And uh I'm I'm still sitting here stunned.
It was it was so it's just so sad.
There's no other way to uh to describe it.
People that know them personally and have uh worked with them all of their lives, I I guarantee you are feeling uh the depths of disappointment today over this news, and we want to send along our uh heartfelt prayers and condolences as well to um Robert Kraft and his family, Jonathan is the rest of the children.
I wanted to mention this at the uh beginning of the program to um have it have it known that this uh lady was beyond the NFL and beyond the people that knew her.
I want you to know what a just undeniably great and unique individual she was.
I could give you all kinds of details, it'd be self-serving, I don't want to do that.
She just was a truly wonderful and great person.
And she's gonna be profoundly missed.
Uh a wallflower she was not.
Myra Hyatt Kraft.
We'll be back after this, my friend.
Sit tight.
L Rushbaugh, the EIB network, don't go away.
And we're back, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Oh, Myra Kraft was only 68 years old.
That's um it's it's it's I still unbelievable here uh folks that I that I uh I got this uh got this news.
Um, but it is what it is, and it helps to put things in perspective whenever anyone that that that you know closely, intimately passes away, even though you think it might happen, it still comes as a shock.
Anyway, uh I I have a couple things here.
The editrix of the most widely read political newsletter in the world.
That'd be mine, the uh limbaugh letter.
Diana Alloco.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's Italian.
It doesn't no, no, it doesn't a nickname for being an idiot.
Not a local, no, it a loco is a Democrat, loco just crazy.
That's her name, a loco.
You know, it's not a description, is her name.
And we're working on the next issue of the Limbaugh letter, and she found a couple of fascinating things.
We're putting together a timeline, uh, which is one of our one of our monthly features.
We're doing a timeline on the history of the debt limit in this country.
Now, last week and many days prior, I've called your attention to the Democrat Party playbook, the leftist playbook about how class envy and certain elements like when Obama came out and said, I Social Security checks and checks for veterans, I can't guarantee they're gonna go out.
That's the playbook.
When Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz goes out and slimes Alan West on the floor of the House, the Democrat playbook.
Here's a Congressman from South Florida who is a prince of a man.
She accuses him of wanting to balance the budget on the backs of seasoned citizens and basically sending them off to their death by denying them Medicare and Social Security.
This is none of it's true, of course.
It's just absolutely appalling, but it's from the playbook.
But I have these two things to show you what a game we are in the middle of.
To show you how we are being played.
To show you how Washington, both parties, both sides never, ever change.
Although, I really don't want to lump the Republicans into this like that because we now have circumstances which are unique and separate from any previous debate on this subject.
Because what's hanging in the balance is the country.
And it's not an overstatement to say that.
This is the New York Times News Service, January 30th, 1967.
Seven.
Thank you.
LBJ's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Fowler told Congress today that the government would be unable to pay all its bills if the ceiling on the national debt was not lifted within 30 days.
Fowler ran into Republican hostility in day-long testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.
He asked that the ceiling be raised by 7 billion to 337 billion to cover the period until June 30th.
Further legislation covering the period after June 30th will be needed later, he said.
Fowler said that payments for such things as old age benefits, veterans' pensions, public assistance benefits, tax refunds, and the salaries of government workers would be threatened if the ceiling were not raised.
I am reading to you from the New York Times 1967.
It is identical, other than the numbers or what we are being told today.
Fowler said, unless the debt limit is increased by the end of February, at which time our outstanding obligations will exceed that which we could legally borrow.
The possibility of an economic and monetary derangement will be a reality.
1967, they were threatening default.
1967, the Democrats told us it was a crisis.
They created chaos.
The Democrat handbook can be traced all the way back to 1967, LBJ's Treasury Secretary.
I have another example.
Jimmy Carter's Treasury Secretary, April 3rd, 1979.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation yesterday, extended the debt ceiling.
It came after the House rejected a Republican-led attempt to tack on a strong amendment calling for a balanced federal budget.
Are you hearing this?
1979.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation yesterday extending the debt ceiling came after the House rejected a Republican-led attempt to tack on a strong amendment calling for a balanced federal budget.
The House vote came after Carter Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal claimed in a letter that the Treasury was on the verge of a default and that retired persons would be hit first.
About $8 billion in Social Security checks already had been mailed to 35 million Americans, Blumenthal said, and there would be no funds to cover them if the House failed to act.
In addition, he said that the Treasury would not be able to pay civil service retirement benefits, veterans' benefits, railroad retirement benefits.
Blumenthal last week ordered that no further income tax refund checks be mailed until the House acted.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are being played for the biggest saps on the face of the earth.
We are being insulted and treated like the biggest dolts.
This is the way the Democrat Party has been doing things since at least 67.
Your guiding light to the truth and to justice, the common sense, and the sanity.
Rush Limbaugh epitomizing that and much more here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I'm struck.
Instinctively, you know, you've heard it all before.
Well, troubled by veterans.
Did you read the New York Times from 1967?
And it's aside from the numbers.
What's being said today?
Even as recently as 1979.
Plug in the Republican demand for balanced budget amendment.
One big difference between 1979 and today, a lot of the conservative media is opposed to balanced budget amendment back in 79.
It wasn't.
It was pretty much unified the conservative media conservative movement.
Now it's been fractured all over the place out there.
But it's just striking.
Hitch you upside the head.
A cold ice shower.
You realize what suckers they think we are.
You realize the patterns, the playbooks, the tactics, the scare tactics, the fearmongering.
Crisis mongering, all of this.
It's written down.
It's taught.
This is not instinctive.
This stuff, uh, this this is this, I guess, is what these people learn at Harvard and Yale and the Kennedy School of Government, wherever it else they go to get educated.
This how they're mentored.
Not one shred of difference.
The difference now is that we've reached a point, you know, we've all these years in the past where we say, okay, well, we'll kick the can down there, well, we'll deal with it later.
We've gotten to the point where we're running out of road.
We really are.
This is different.
Now, no matter what happens here, the country is not going to collapse tomorrow.
But if this current Regime gets four more years.
All bets are off.
Because the steps necessary to remedy this will be so profound.
Folks, Michael Boskin wrote a piece in a Wall Street Journal while I was gone, former economic advisor for George H.W. Bush.
And he calculated ran the numbers.
He added up the federal tax rate, what it's projected to be.
It's just eliminating the Bush tax rate.
It's just going back to Clinton with the top marginal rate, 39.6%.
Current state tax rates.
Then adding up everything Obama wants.
Obama wants no ceiling on earnings that are taxed for Social Security.
Right now it's $106,000 a year.
Once you go past that, you stop paying Social Security deduction.
Wants to eliminate that.
As Medicare is, Medicare is now what?
2.5%, 3% of every dollar you earn.
Social Security is about 12.5 when you add it all up, 1215% of everything up to 106.
Obama wants to eliminate that.
The states are going to raise their income tax rates.
By the time all of this happens in the next five years, a school teacher in California earning $60,000 a year will have an effective marginal tax rate of 69 point something percent on all income, counting all taxes.
So when you hear Obama and the Democrats say that the middle class isn't going to get taxed, and when you hear them say that only people 200, 250,000 a year or more are going to pay the tax increase.
There isn't enough money there to run this government for very long if you confiscate all of the wealth of people who make 250,000 a year or more.
Those of you who earn 60,000 live in California, New York, Massachusetts, and some other state, you are looking very soon if this man gets his way on everything, and if there isn't any spending reform, and if there's no entitlement reform, and if there isn't any tax reform, this is the difference between 1967 and today.
This is the difference between 1979 and today.
To just service the debt.
We're going to add $13 trillion of debt the next 10 years if Obama gets what he wants.
A total aggregate national debt of $27 trillion in 10 more years.
And everybody is going to be paying a tax rate combined of 70%.
This doesn't count your property taxes.
This doesn't count all those little fees in your phone bill and your cable TV bill and all that other rot-gut-hidden stuff that's in there.
It's not going to be productive to work, which is just fine with Obama.
This is really point of return time here.
Now this gang of six business is an absolute joke.
All I need to do is look who's for it.
All I need to do is see who's praising it.
When I see Obama saying, now there's balance.
Okay, gang of six bill done.
When I hear Jim Dement oppose it, that's it.
Gang is six bill done.
It's that simple, folks.
It's that easy.
You think of the news media's role in there.
They report all of these quotes from all these people, all this crisis mongering stuff, all the end of the world stuff, the social security checks not going out, the veterans checks nothing.
They breathlessly report this as though it's unprecedented.
It's not unprecedented, it's the rule of the day.
It's status quo.
It is how the ruling class in this country has always Achieved what they want.
That's what we learn from this.
No, that's what we confirm or how we confirm what we've always known about how the ruling class gets what it wants, about how it manipulates public opinion.
You know, there was an interesting story.
I sent this to some friends.
I was, I did have a moment while I was way to do some show prep.
When was this?
It was what is this?
Wednesday?
Yeah, so it was Monday night.
For the first time I really had chance to sit down uninterrupted and do some show prep.
And I was reading some of the coverage of what's happening to Rupert Murdoch and his family over in the UK with this uh with this phone hacking scandal.
Now this was profound to me, and it opened my eyes about a lot of things.
And I'm not too proud to say that age 60, my eyes can be still wide opened, and I can still learn things that I thought I knew.
I can still be shocked at what I don't know.
I'm not ashamed to admit that.
And I can still be shocked and a little embarrassed at how I miss something that's right in front of my face.
That's so obvious.
I'm not too proud to admit that at age 60 that can still happen to me.
This was a piece about why Murdoch is in trouble.
And it described the business model for Murdoch's British news entities, the newspapers he owned, and even broadcast entities.
Murdoch, or let's not say Murdoch, the the name of the company, News, whatever the no, because he doesn't do this worldwide.
This is specific business plan for the UK.
Whatever the news corp subsidiary name, I can't think of it right now, but it'll um it'll come to me out there.
Uh the point is that for the longest time, Murdoch had everybody in the ruling class in Britain thinking that his publications shaped public opinion.
But he never cared about shaping public opinion.
He followed it.
Murdoch's ability to shape public opinion, this story said, was never tested because his papers editorially never took a position contrary to the majority public opinion in the UK.
Whatever the majority, according to focus groups and polling data, whatever the majority public opinion was, turned out to be the editorial positions of Murdoch's newspapers.
This created the illusion within the political class that Murdoch was to be feared because he shaped public opinion.
But what it really allowed him to do was to exercise and wield power over the political class.
Well, when I go back and I read this garbage here from 1967 of New York Times and 1979 from this publication, it's not identified to it happened at Google Newspaper search, so it's search.
It's some it's some newspaper, but realize what the what the game is here.
Now, in this country, the media does try to shape opinion.
I'm not uh I'm not trying to say that, but there are elements of that same business practice taking place here.
The illusion of shaping public opinion when it really doesn't happen when public opinion is simply followed.
Uh the symbiotic, almost incestuous relationship between our mainstream media and the Democrat Party is thus explained.
So these guys in our media breathlessly report News International is uh is the subsidiary in the UK News of the World was the paper, but all the papers are owned with the umbrella News International.
The ruling class cannot even come up with new threats.
They recycle the same old threats for 40, 50 years almost now.
And the media willingly breathlessly plays along as though this has never happened before, as though politicians have never faced this kind of crisis.
Well, in fact, this is precisely how the ruling class gets what it wants.
It is how the ruling class successfully manipulates public opinion.
And I don't care what issue it is, global warming, the collapse of the United States economy when it came to TARP, whatever it is, it is now the only way Armageddon or else.
We get our way or it's Armageddon.
As I mentioned at the top of the program, the way this heat wave is being portrayed.
It's right out of the playbook.
It's never happened before.
There are people dying because of the heat.
Create this crisis, and it's designed to get us to cave.
The real effort here is to get you to cave.
Along with the Republicans, of course, in Congress, but we are the ones that are supposed to be under the boot.
We are the ones that are the jack boot on our throats with all this.
And it's smoke and mirrors.
And these to these people, folks, I guarantee you, this is just the game.
And it's the way it's played.
And that the fact the country's at a crossroads that we've never been at before, the fact that the country's existence as we know it is something paramountly important to us.
It's not to them.
They don't see it that way.
This is just the latest greatest attempt out of necessity to get what they want.
By making us believe that it's the best thing for us.
When in this case, it's nowhere even close.
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
Another piece of evidence, ladies and gentlemen, in the ongoing story of the ruling class attempt to bend and shape our opinion to get what they want.
This is a public opinion poll just released yesterday, isn't it miraculous?
The NBC Wall Street Journal poll is out now.
And guess what?
Guess what?
Independents have all of a sudden had their fill of it.
And they want the debt limit raised and they want tax increases.
It's right here in a poll.
I hear right here.
In my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
It's B.S. Total B.S. It's a poll of adults.
It's not a poll of any voters.
It's not a poll of likely voters or registered voters, a poll of adults.
It's a poll of blithering idiots.
Republicans who have refused to compromise with Obama.
There's nothing to compromise.
He does not have a plan.
How in the world do you compromise with a doofus that's got no plan on paper?
What what are we compromising with?
Who are we compromising with?
What the hell's the thing we're compromising with?
We're compromising with ourselves.
They want us to compromise with ourselves, which means they want us to give up what really matters to us.
Yeah, it's a doofus.
Sounds better than jackass.
Republicans who have refused to compromise with President Obama to avoid a U.S. dead default are heeding the anti-tax wishes of their conservative base, but dot dot dot are also risking isolation for many independent voters.
Public opinion shifts in favor of getting a deal done.
The poll of 1,000 adults found a dramatic shift.
This is all BS.
This is a pee pee caca BS, folks.
This is a this is an opinion poll designed to shape opinion.
And you know how it's designed to make you think that you all of us, you are the footy duddy.
You're the one that's etched in cement.
You're the one that's old-fashioned while all the smart people, the independent, they finally see the light.
And now they want Obama to get what he wants.
It's unfair that he can't.
And we don't know what he wants.
At least on paper, we know philosophically.
A plurality of Americans, 38%, said the debt ceiling should be raised against 31% who said it shouldn't.
A month ago, 39% said the debt limit shouldn't be raised.
28% said it should.
Why was that dramatic?
I mean, five days, six days I was gone.
Look at what happened here.
And I don't believe this.
This is all part of the way this game is played and structured.
I bet if there were polling data in 67, we could go back and we can find identical polling results.
Maybe different numbers, but identical attitudinal shift.
I'll bet you we could.
Just getting warmed up here, folks.
Little side note, Apple Incorporated announced their third quarter financial statement.
$76 billion in cash.
They have on hand.
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