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July 29, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:46
July 29, 2011, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
The views expressed by the host on this program make more sense than anything anybody else happens to be saying out there.
And the reason is the views expressed by the hosts in the show are rooted in a daily unstoppable, relentless pursuit of the truth.
And I am your host, El Rushpo, the hardest working man in the no business.
It's Friday.
Let's go.
Live from the Southern Command in Sunny South Florida.
It's open line Friday.
That's right, the hardest working man in the no business.
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Okay, here's the latest.
You know, all of this uh all of this uh uh uh discussion apparently has worked as worked.
The uh the Boehner 3.0 version has just been released.
It's a it's a large PDF file.
And I've uh I've had just a brief chance to go through this.
It's uh it's a hundred and four pages, and they have to have so many pages just to have room for all the zeros.
As they talk about all the trillions of dollars here.
The word trigger does not appear one time in it.
The word taxes shows up once, but not in the context of raising them.
Balanced budget shows up four times.
Boehner 3.0 basically does this would pave the way for the debt limit to be raised through the 2010 election in two chunks, but it would mandate that the second increase of the debt ceiling could only occur after a balanced budget amendment passed both chambers of Congress and went to the states for ratification.
That's the big difference in Boehner's 3.0.
Now, before we get into the specifics of all of this, want to say something to you, conservatives out there.
I want to tell you how damn proud of you I am because you made this happen.
The conservative intelligentsia, the conservative so-called media inside the beltway would have accepted anything.
Yesterday, the day before, last night, would have accepted anything that Boehner put forth.
Because they are operating out of fear.
The Republican leadership operating out of fear.
And I want you to think to transfer that to your personal life, and I want to ask you to consider whenever you do anything out of fear, how does it turn out?
Doing anything from the perspective of fear is disastrous, or potentially so.
And that has been the position of the Republican leadership and the inside-the-beltway so-called conservative media.
Fear.
Fear of being blamed.
Primarily, but fear of other things.
The age old fears, the fears rooted in the mentality of being consistent, constant losers.
Remember the Republicans won the control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, and one of the biggest problems they faced was they had 40 years Of being in the minority as their mindset.
It was hard within a matter of days to start acting like winners.
They never had been.
It's like the person who loses a tremendous amount of weight.
Still feel fat.
This is what you get conditioned.
You stop and look at yourself in the mirror every time you see a mirror.
Just to confirm that you actually have lost the weight because you don't believe it.
Same thing with people who are consistent losers.
And Ray Lahood yesterday citing, we need to go back to Bob Michael was a classic example.
We got to go back to being full-time losers.
That's our place in Washington.
Well, you don't accept that.
And I don't accept it.
And you have not accepted it.
And you've let it be known that you will not accept a loser attitude, a loser mentality among our leadership in Washington.
How in the world can we look at ourselves as losers with this man, Barack Obama, as president?
This man is on his back.
He is on his last legs.
The gross domestic product of this country is 1.3%.
We are living in a man-made disaster, personally made by Barack Obama.
There is no reason to compromise with people who have not offered any substantive ideas of their own.
There is no reason to continue to act like losers, particularly coming off the November elections when we were landslide winners.
Winners do not compromise.
Winners do not compromise with themselves.
The winners who do compromise are winners who still don't believe in themselves as winners, who still think of themselves as losers.
And you and I are finished with supporting people who think of themselves as losers or in the minority, or we don't have the power, or we don't control all three branches, or what have you.
I wish Barack Obama would give a speech every day.
I don't believe.
The news reports that say Obama's losing sleep, I don't believe that.
I don't believe his hair's getting gray.
I think they're putting flour in it every day to make it look like it's getting grayer, or whatever the makeup trick is.
This man has taken our country to the brink.
The gross domestic product, the growth numbers today, my friends, are unacceptable.
It is a shame.
And it is an embarrassment.
The ChICOM economy is growing at nine and a half percent.
We are being outperformed by a communist country.
This should not be our new norm.
And there is no way that we ought to be compromising with the architect of the disaster that has befallen our country.
On what basis is Barack Obama viewed as a leader?
On what basis is Barack Obama viewed as even a winner?
He and his party were shellacked in the November elections.
There are 25 or 30 courageous Republican freshmen who held out for this.
Mike, grab audio sound bites 9, 10, and 11.
So I want you to hear these.
This is the media, befuddled over these Tea Party freshmen.
Last night it's on Anderson Cooper 19 on CNN.
He spoke with senior political analyst Gloria Borger about the House not voting on Boehner's debt bill, version 2.0.
Anderson Coover, so what happened?
Looked like things are moving in the right direction for Speaker Boehner earlier today, and they had to test vote, it went big.
What happened?
He ran up against freshmen who don't owe him anything, Anderson.
They were elected outside of the establishment.
And honestly, a lot of them don't care if they get re-elected.
They believe they were sent to Congress to make uh government smaller and uh to cut the deficit.
And this is What they intend to do, and they believe that the Boehner bill is not strong enough because they understand that at some point there's gonna have to be a compromise.
So they want the House to have the strongest possible bargaining position that it can have.
So Borger, after after she says the House freshmen believe they were sent to Washington to make government smaller, and that that's what they intend to do.
Cooper and Borger have this exchange.
John King's part of this too.
Gloria, it seems when you talk to some of them, they don't care necessarily about being re-elected.
No, they don't.
These are Which is actually kind of refreshing, I gotta say.
But uh compromise is the way things get done in Washington, and it shouldn't be a dirty word, I don't think, maybe.
But I understand that they're standing on principle, but they're also standing on the precipice of something, and that is the country going into default.
No, Gloria, the country is not going to go into a default, and we have there are there have been secret contingency meetings, and we've got the story.
I don't even need the story, though, to know the country's not going into default.
We're also tired of being lied to.
The country is not going into default.
The Treasury has had meetings with Obama and with others about paying the bondholders first, which is what must be done to avoid default.
It's going to be done.
There will not be any default.
If there is a default, it's because President Obama wants there to be one.
And if there is a default, he will make it happen, rolling the dice that he can get away with blaming the Republicans for it.
But there will not be a default if the debt ceiling is not raised.
Now, guess who today is chiming in all of a sudden, starting yesterday, actually, with oh my God, oh my God, oh my god, we gotta get this done.
Lloyd Blank Fine, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street.
The same tactic, the same technique that was used before TARP is being redeployed.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, we face a disaster.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, we've got to get this done.
No, we don't have to get it done just to get it done.
We don't have to get it done just to get it off somebody's plate.
We don't have to get it done from a standpoint or a basis of fear.
We do not have to compromise with the people who are destroying this country who will not put forth their own ideas.
And the reason they won't put forth their own ideas is because were they to do so, the country would automatically totally reject every one of them because every idea they have is more of the same that has destroyed this country and this economy and continues to do so.
Conservatives, those of you in this audience who are conservatives, there is no reason for fear.
There is no reason to compromise with the people who have done the destruction and will do more if they prevail.
There is no reason to act like losers.
A, we're not losers, B, in the strict sense, we're landslide winners going back last November.
And I don't care what poll you look at, and I don't care what media report you listen to.
The independents have not fled our reservation.
The independents are more and more opposed to the policies that have contributed to the destruction of our economy.
It is Obama who's in a panic.
It is Obama who desperately needs this.
We should not and will not be the lifeline to his reelection.
Thank you.
Thank you.
But if we continue to act out of fear, this is what'll happen.
Obama goes out there, makes another speech today, and begs people to call Washington.
Let me tell you who's calling.
Every time he goes out and does that, it's you.
His people aren't calling.
They're not motivated.
You are the ones who are calling.
You are the ones melting the phone lines in Washington.
That's why there's Boehner 3.0.
You.
And Boehner 3.0 is still not etched in stone.
It's still subject to be changed during the course of the day today.
But those of us who held firm and refused to go along just because we're members of the we gotta do something caucus.
We got to do something.
We gotta do something.
We gotta do anything.
No, we don't.
It is fear that makes people say, this is the best we can do right now.
This is we gotta take it.
We gotta sign this.
Sorry, I don't subscribe to any of this.
That I am hearing from the so-called conservative intelligence of media inside the beltway.
They would have they would have they would have encouraged Republicans to vote for anything that Boehner put forth yesterday and last night.
There's been a third bill, an actual version C of this going along, being talked about negotiated behind everybody's back all along, Boehner Reed.
When Boehner said after he walked out of the meetings with Obama, you know what, I'm gonna start talking to congressional leaders, exactly what he did, Reed McConnell.
And that's Boehner 4.0.
And it's exactly what we told you it was yesterday.
What I speculated too yesterday or about yesterday turns out to be exactly what was happening.
I get now politico and other news stories document it to be true.
Boehner sent over to the House or to the Senate.
Harry Reid all of a sudden sees some things in it that he likes.
The Boehner bill becomes the Reed bill.
It gets sent back to the House Republicans after they think by sending their bill over to Reed, they've got the Democrats over the barrel.
That bill gets changed dramatically, looks nothing like it was when it arrived the Senate, gets sent back to the House, and the barrel is back on the Republican side.
They are the ones over the barrel.
So we'll see where this all unfolds.
One more audio summary before we go to the break with F. Chuck Todd, MSNBC this morning.
Uh this is the his opinion here of the House freshmen and their steadfastness.
Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy were linked in this.
This isn't necessarily about John Boehner not being able to corral these folks.
The question is, could any Republican speaker have corraled these votes at this time?
Here's the issue they had.
They can't buy them off.
They don't want earmarks.
They don't care about their committee assignments, and many of these newcomers didn't get their raising a lot of money anyway, so being promised fundraising all that doesn't work.
It may be refreshing on one hand, but it makes it that much harder to try to arm twist and get this vote count to happen.
Whoa, and isn't that exactly what we wanted to end up in Washington?
Can't buy them off.
The media ticked off.
F. Chuck can't believe the establishment can't buy the votes of these Tea Party freshmen.
That's why we need to keep winning elections.
Putting it very simply, ladies and gentlemen, Tea Party is putting country before party.
Didn't Obama tell us that that's what we had to do.
The Tea Party is putting country before party.
They can't be bought off with committee assignments with campaign re-election funds.
They can't be bought, and Washington can't understand this.
And they admit that it's refreshing, but it's not as refreshing as compromise would be.
Speaking of which, Dingy Harry just came out and said that Boehner 3.0 is worse is even more unacceptable than the original.
Now, how's that for the spirit of compromise?
We have the president of the United States, the real loser in all of this, the man who is in real trouble.
And we need to start acting that way.
And we need to start believing it.
I have never understood Why and how members of our party can feel defensive and filled with fear.
What is there to be afraid of?
Why be afraid of somebody who's taken unemployment up to nearly 10%?
The growth rate to 1.3%.
Tell me, why be afraid of running against that?
Why be afraid of opposing that?
And I'm fed up with being afraid of the media.
Doing whatever you do because you are afraid will guarantee you do the wrong thing.
Because your motivation is distorted.
Tea Party is putting the country before party.
The debt ceiling is our friend.
It'll cut spending by 40%.
What's wrong with that?
That's what we're here to do.
That's what the November election was about was cutting spending.
It's not a disaster.
It's called a good start.
Not only is the most recent GDP rate, the growth rate of the economy, not only is it at 1.3%.
The first quarter growth weight growth rate was revised to just 0.4%, not even one half of a percentage point.
We're back in a recession.
We're back in another risk.
0.4%.
And we're in we're in fear.
We're afraid of Obama.
We think this guy's a lock to be re-elected unless we pass the banner bill.
No logic in this, folks.
Nothing but the same old, same old political behavior, one party acting like the minority and constant losers.
In constant fear of what the media is going to say and of what the president's going to say.
You got 25 or 30 Tea Partiers who are saying, I don't care.
I came here to save the country.
And they are putting country before party, and Washington cannot understand it.
The black middle class is eroding.
That's another story in the stack today.
Black middle class eroding.
The black unemployment rate is soaring.
And we are afraid of the architect of this.
Here is Boehner 3.0.
This is it.
It has a two-step process for raising the debt ceiling just like Boehner 2.0.
As currently written, before the president can request the second tranche of increased debt authority.
The first stage of the raising the debt limit would take us through the first of the year in early spring, maybe.
Before the president can request the second tranche, this select committee of six Democrats and six Republicans must produce spending cuts larger than that second debt hike.
But it doesn't say when the spending cuts happen.
The change to the bill would specify the modification, what makes this Boehner 3.0.
Before the president can request the second tranche of debt authority, meaning that before he can request to raise the debt ceiling again early next year, the select committee must produce spending cuts larger than the hike and wait for it.
A balanced budget amendment must be sent to the states.
Now, right now, a lot of people are applauding that.
Thank you.
But hold on.
I've read the paragraph.
I have the paragraph that constitutes the difference.
Here, here, here.
I just ended up in my trash box.
For those of you watching on the ditto cam, There it is.
I'm not going to zoom in.
I don't have time to play with controls right.
But that's the paragraph.
Out of 104 pages, that's the change.
And it basically says that the select committee must produce spending cuts larger than the second debt level increase, and a balanced budget amendment must be sent to the states.
In fact, the wording on that is this.
And the archivist of the United States has submitted to the states for their ratification a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States pursuant to a joint resolution entitled Joint Resolution proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
That's all it says.
For example, there's nothing specific about what the BBA will say.
It's not as specific like it was when it was associated with cat cut cap and balance.
You can, for example, claim to want to balance the budget with massive taxes.
If there's no specificity saying without tax increase, balanced budget amendment without tax increases, what good is it?
Now Dingy Harry has said this is less acceptable, or it's more unacceptable than Boehner 2.0.
Now they have to know that this is not going to get past Harry Reed.
They have to know this isn't.
They're not, the Democrats are not going to sign on to a balanced budget amendment.
It's like asking Colonel Sanders to stop killing chickens.
Isn't going to happen.
But they are negotiating.
This balanced budget amendment being included here in Boehner 3.0 might give some people cover, meaning Republicans in the House might give them cover to vote for it.
But this entire process is deceptive.
And I don't think everybody's being told facts yesterday.
I pretty much put forth a conspiracy theory that we've been set up from the start.
We're a bunch of saps being played as saps.
Remember when Boehner broke off talks with Obama, said he was going to try to make a deal with the leaders in the Senate.
Maybe he did do exactly that, and maybe he's been quietly working with McConnell and Reed and Biden all along behind the scenes.
The Boehner and Reed plans are remarkably similar, except for the timeline and the BBA.
The timeline could be easily extended by just adding in the phony defense cuts from Reed's bill.
Could well be that Reed called the Boehner bill dead on arrival to give Boehner cover on the right.
Maybe it's all been kabuki theater after all.
The reason that I say this is there's a Fox News story by Ed Henry, the real deal Boehner was working on while asking his members to vote for a deal that he knew would be used to bring this all about.
Potential debt limit plan C emerges.
Plan C. Democrat officials are cautiously optimistic.
This is uh from yesterday.
Democrat officials cautiously optimistic that the outlines of a potential compromise, a plan C are emerging that could bridge the differences between plans pushed by Boehner and Reed.
The Democrat official said President Obama has spent the past couple days quietly reaching out to leaders in both parties to try and start hammering out the details, though it's clear this is still only in the discussion phase.
They're not close to a deal yet.
Senate budget chairman, Kent Conrad Democrat Norton Dakota hinted at such a compromise earlier Thursday during an interview on Fox.
He said, let me just say behind the scenes there are discussions underway to find a way forward.
To how would you harmonize what leader Reed has come up with, the speaker Boehner's come up with, and I'm increasingly of the view that we can do that.
Did they're not telling us about this, folks.
We think that Boehner is talking to the Republican caucus to try to come up with something to get Republican votes, but really Boehner's talking with Reed.
And I'm sure McConnell's part of the deal, too.
So I wonder if this is true.
I wonder how Republicans in the House feel if they might think that they're not being told fully what's going on.
I think I I well, the vote has been delayed twice.
I think largely that's because of people in this audience and elsewhere letting it be known that this is unacceptable.
That they don't care what the big names at Krauthammer Review Online believe.
And the Crystal Standard.
The Wall Street Journal called its subscribers hobbits yesterday.
The Wall Street Journal, the people subscribed to that are conservatives in an editorial they're calling you hobbits.
The subscribers, they just want a deal.
That magic word, compromise.
Anyways.
That's the magic.
Obama's remarks this morning seemed to be addressing this plan C. If you knew that there's a plan C being talked about, then it makes what Obama said a little bit clearer.
So essentially, uh ladies and gentlemen, what's going on is what I thought was going on yesterday.
And that is a way for Reed to take whatever the Republicans come up with and all of a sudden say, you know what?
Now this I can work with.
Make it his bill in the Senate and then send it back to the Republicans.
The theory on why this will work is because everybody thinks the Republicans are acting out of fear.
They're so desperate to get this signed and off the table and to move on.
That they'll sign whatever's in it.
That's where they're wrong.
And I think they are figuring this out even now.
as we speak.
I must take a brief timeout, ladies.
We'll do that.
We'll continue here on Open Line Friday when we get back.
Don't go away.
you Hi, welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh, open line Friday.
Great to have you with us.
The sticking point of plan three is the trigger, or plan C, and that, you know, what triggers it.
That's that's the uh the sticking point.
Here's the politico version of ladies and gentlemen of the story.
Democrats are aiming for a debt limit compromise similar to the House Republican plan, but at least one major difference.
The second vote on raising the debt ceiling would not depend on Congress passing a broader deficit reduction package.
That's the trigger.
This is the I'm talking about version C. This not Boehner 3.0 with this new balanced budget amendment, the one they're really talking about behind closed doors.
Democrats are aiming for a debit, a debt limit compromise similar to the House Republican plan, with one major difference, the second vote, meaning next year we got to raise the debt limit again.
How ridiculous is this that we're even we're gonna raise the debt limit here, we're gonna raise it again next spring.
I know we're trying to deny one giant raise so that uh Obama doesn't get his lifeline, but the whole point is we're supposed to be cutting it.
Anyway, the second vote on raising the debt ceiling would not depend, this Democrat demand, on Congress passing a broader deficit reduction package.
Meaning, the Democrats don't like this idea that there have to be spending cuts equal to the debt increase the second time next spring.
Now the shape of this, and that's the trigger they disagree on.
The shape of this potential compromise meshes major elements of the proposals offered in recent weeks by Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and Dinji Harry, according to Democrat officials familiar with the negotiations.
So there's two stories on this version C out there, Fox and Politico.
Under the possible compromise, Congress could still get a second crack at voting on the debt limit within months.
But rather than linking the vote to Congress approving the recommendations of a new 12-member committee, as it would be in the Bahner bill, Democrats prefer McConnell's proposal that allows President Obama to lift the debt ceiling unless two-thirds of both chambers override his veto.
So what the Democrats want is for Obama to be able to raise the debt limit on his own during the second stanch or tranch, which would be sometime early next year, without any corresponding spending cuts.
The only stop would be a veto.
Two thirds of both houses opposing it, which in the Senate you can forget about.
So essentially, what is actually being talked about is not Bahner 3.0, but plan C. And if they come to an agreement on that trigger, Boehner 2.0, well, it'll get passed and sit over there and then it'll become plan C. That's the game it's being played.
To force action on a deficit reduction package, the White House would agree to strengthen the mechanism that compels Congress to pass the special committee's recommendations.
According to these Democrat officials, the officials would not detail proposals for a so-called trigger that acts as an incentive for both parties to bargain in good faith and reach agreement, because there won't be one.
Democrats want the trigger to include taxes.
That's what they're holding out for.
Boehner 2.0, Boehner 3.0, Plan C. The Democrats are holding out for taxes.
And that's why they'll not put it on paper.
It is why they don't have a specific plan.
Well, they do.
They just they won't commit it to paper.
And when Obama went out there today this morning, in his remarks, said that he would support a trigger mechanism that would implement future spending cuts as long as it's done in a smart and balanced way.
Now, smart and balanced way, I am so sick of this kind of Washington speak.
There's nothing smart about this administration, and there's nothing balanced about it.
The fact that we let them get away with owning the notion that they're smart and they have balance in what they're doing is absurd.
They are the most leftist destructive administration this country has had in the modern era.
Maybe ever.
I can't think of a regime which has led an assault like this on the U.S. private sector relentlessly.
And not even lightened up on it.
So Obama will support the trigger as long as it's done in a smart and balanced way.
That means any plan will have to include higher taxes to get his support.
Because whenever he talks about a balanced approach, he means higher taxes.
The Democrats want there to be automatic taxes that kick in if the Republicans don't agree with their cuts.
It's always about taxes with the Democrats, always.
And we're supposed to compromise.
We have been compromising every day of this whole silly process with ourselves to try to please Them because we are acting out of fear.
We are afraid if somebody would lose in a landslide if the election were held today.
So there it is.
Plan C. Hold on to your back pocket.
It's about tax increases, and we will be back.
I have more on this so we uh start the next hour.
The politico has lost it now.
Headline the Tea Party's terrorist tactics.
The Tea Party have now become full-blown terrorists.
In a straight-up news story from the Politico, Tea Party, full-blown terrorists.
Just for standing up the Democrats.
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