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Aug. 1, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
August 1, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
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Yeah, this is a good looking shirt.
It is a good looking shirt.
People have been telling me they like the shirt is a good looking shirt.
You can see it if you're a subscriber at Rushlinbaugh.com and watch us on the high definition Ditto Cam.
By the way, by the way, speaking of all of that, overwhelming number of entries into our little fun contest last week at 2FBT.com, buy a case of tea and enter a chance to win a lifetime or a year's supply, not lifetime, years supply of two of PyT.
We have the five winners.
We're going to draw them at random, and we're going to announce them on Wednesday.
And you know what?
Catherine and I will be making the personal phone calls to the winners.
Right.
I was going to ask Snerdley to do it, but he gets so ticked off by the end of the day, having spoken to people on the phone.
That if they don't have the right appreciative attitude, it could go wrong.
Right?
So uh Catherine and I are going to call the winners on uh on Wednesday to announce who they are, make arrangements.
And by we we are, as we're sold out now.
We've gone through our supply of Diet Raspberry.
We have begun bottling a whole new gazillion bottles of tea today.
And we rolled out with a huge, I mean, we rolled out with plenty of stock to uh satisfy the initial crush national demand.
We're getting short on uh on regular tea as well.
So sit tight and be patient.
We won't be long, and we'll be restocked on Diet Raspberry Greetings.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh here at the Limbaugh Institute for ideological purity.
All right, now here is here's what's going on.
You know, a lot of Republicans voted for the Bahner bill that got sent over to Dingy Harry.
Now you and I all knew that that bill was gonna be monkeyed around with and sent back.
And that's exactly what's happened.
I don't care the caterwalling coming from the mouth of Sheila Jackson Lee or Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz or some of these Democrats who say the deal is a Satan sandwich sugar-coated Satan Sandwich.
I that that's funny.
I'm kind of happy they don't like it, but but the the real point on our side here is there are gonna be a lot of Republicans who voted for the Boehner bill, who are now going to rail against this Senate bill, and they're gonna vote against it, splitting the baby, having it both ways.
Voted for Baehner 3.0, but voting against what comes back, which is essentially the Reed McConnell bill.
Acting like they didn't know what was gonna happen.
We knew what was gonna happen all along, but they're acting like they didn't know.
They really there are some Republicans who actually want us to believe that they thought by passing the Boehner Bill 3.0 and sending it over to the Senate that that put the Democrats over the barrel.
And we knew that it didn't.
So it is it is important to remember who supported this bill.
Important because they live by writing and talking and building their reputations for wisdom, supposedly.
Just how wrong and awful they have been.
A bunch of our inside the beltway guys who told us that this bill had to be signed.
It was the best we could get.
We've only got one third of the government, and this is what we had to do is the best bill we can get.
There are no tax increases in it, and it cuts spending.
Folks, any way you slice it, we're gonna get tax increases.
Follow me on this.
Just take the Bush tax cuts.
If they expire, We get a tax increase.
If they are extended, according to this deal, they will have to be offset by new taxes.
Because if the Bush tax cuts are extended, the CBO's going to say that there's a shortfall of nearly five trillion dollars.
That's how screwed we are.
A tax cut.
And actually it won't be a tax cut, just the extension of the current rates will be said to cause a $5 trillion shortfall to our precious government that will have to be offset by new taxes.
And before we get to the deadline, if Obama's not happy with what this new debt commission comes up with in November, he has said on the White House website that he'll kill the Bush tax cut extensions for additional revenue.
So the Bush tax cuts are dead in three ways.
I went to the White House.gov and their headline, fact sheet, bipartisan debt deal, a win for the economy and budget discipline.
It's a very long piece.
I'm not going to read the whole thing to you.
But it is the most straightforward and complete outline of the deal from the White House perspective that there is.
And at Whitehouse.gov, they are beside themselves with joy.
This post crows about how this debt deal locks in Obama's runaway spending.
They're ecstatic about how it slashes the military and protects entitlements.
Even locks in the end of the Bush tax cuts.
All of which should disabuse anyone of the notion that the Republicans pulled off a tremendous victory here.
Note too, there will be no spending cuts until after the 2012 elections.
That's part of the deal.
So Obama will get his $2.4 trillion of walking around money with no strings attached, a slush fund, spend it, give it to his union buddies, just like he did the stimulus.
Give it to people who pay union dues, which come back to the Democrat Party.
Just another potentially here, $2.4 trillion of money laundering, which is what he wanted in the first place.
And notice, too, by the way, that the bipartisan committee is scheduled to make their spending cut decisions on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Where now is the outrage?
There was outrage last week about this.
Now nobody's ever uttering a peep.
The bottom line is that this deal increases spending by only $8 trillion instead of $10 trillion.
It lets the politicians claim to have cut spending by $2 trillion.
On top of that, it includes a trigger for more tax increases.
It does nothing about Obamacare, which is yet another whopping tax increase.
So where is the great victory for the Republicans here?
This is the plan C that I told you about last week.
The full name of this bill should be Plan C, I told you so.
Plan SEE, I told you so.
So anyway, slice it.
We're going to get tax increases.
Bush tax cuts.
If they expire, we get a tax increase.
If they're extended according to the deal, they're going to have to be offset by new taxes.
And before we get to the deadline, if Obama's not happy with what his new debt commission comes up with in November, he has said on the White House website that he will kill the Bush tax extensions for additional revenue.
Here's what it says from Whitehouse.gov.
To meet this target of a balanced approach, the new debt committee will consider responsible entitlement and tax reform.
This means putting all the priorities of both parties on the table, including both entitlement reform and revenue raising tax reform.
And the president will demand that the committee pursue a balanced deficit reduction package, where any entitlement reforms are coupled with revenue-raising tax reform that asks for the most fortunate Americans to sacrifice.
This is the White House explanation of the deal to their followers on the website.
Absent a balanced deal that would enable the president to use his veto pen to ensure nearly one trillion dollars in additional deficit reduction by not extending the high income tax cuts.
That really spells out the inevitability of the end of the Bush tax cuts.
They are going to sunset.
It's inevitable.
Maybe 10 to 20% chance they get extended.
Either way, either way, though, it doesn't matter.
The result is a tax increase.
Now, when the economy still falters, as it will, Obama's going to say during the campaign that he worked hard and that he sacrificed and that he compromised, and he went along with all these budget cuts, and he went along with entitlement reform.
Didn't work.
The economy is still going to be mired in recession.
There will not be gazillions of new jobs being created.
That's where Obama's plan B surfaces.
Raising taxes on everybody.
Now many of his constituents, of course, don't pay anything.
But the Bush tax extensions for the rich are dead in the water.
When the economy continues to tank, Obama will call for more skin in the game.
He's got to go where the rest of the money is.
That's his point.
He's going to raise taxes on the only people who have any money left.
His point is to get it.
He's going to come after the middle class, too.
Those making less than $200,000 a year.
You watch.
That $200,000, it's going to be so dire that even more are going to be asked to sacrifice to help out.
Anyone who now pays taxes will be asked to pay more.
And that will be part of his reelection narrative.
And an important point, this deal doesn't talk about Bush tax cuts for the rich.
Obama has already acknowledged that the Bush tax cuts affected everybody.
Middle class.
He did that last December when he said the average American family would see a tax increase of $3,000 a year if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire.
So everybody is going to lose their Bush tax cuts.
Obama will blame the Republicans for it.
As he always does.
This debt deal doesn't specify Bush tax cuts for the rich.
So maybe everybody's going to lose their Bush tax cuts.
That's something for those of you out there who think they're being bought off by thinking only the rich are going to be affected by whatever tax increases.
I am telling you.
It's going to hit everyone.
And he's going to try to blame the Republicans for having to do this because of their slashes in the budget, because their draconian cuts in the budget.
Which will not even have occurred.
but they will be there on paper.
Now remember, Obama wanted to kill the Bush tax cuts back in December, but he was forced to change that to just ending the extensions for the rich.
What if he hopes to use this deal and or this new supercommission to do wave with all of them?
That'd be a hell of a note.
And I think that that is his objective.
The Heritage Foundation has come out against the deal.
They say the deal relies on an insufficient level of cuts, a super committee task with brokering a grand bargain that'll lead to massive tax increases, big defense cuts, or both.
It remains insufficient to the task at hand, and the standards which Heritage Action for America has set forth during the course of the debate.
Said that Eric Cantor said revenue could very well be part of what the debt commission comes up with.
Airy Reed quoting Eric Cantor.
Now we spent $800 billion on the stimulus.
We're going to raise the debt ceiling another $2.4 trillion.
And what did you get?
Nothing but a lousy SEIU for Obama t-shirt.
That's about all you're going to get.
So we've got all the the baseline has been added to the Bush tax cuts sunset.
But again, you know, sounding like a broken record here.
If a reason is found to extend them, it'll be okay as far as Obama's concerned.
That will just allow his commission or the Congressional Commission an excuse to make up that lost revenue.
Let me take a brief timeout.
We'll get to your phone calls coming back on the other side of our obscene profit timeout.
Don't go away.
One more little tidbit here.
I have just destroyed Snerdley's Day, but we snurdly came in here thinking that 23rd anniversary of the show.
And that I was going to be able to proclaim myself a huge winner here.
And poor old Ball is sitting in there obviously just depressed.
Let me add to it here.
This uh this great deal, wonderful victory for fiscal conservatives, raises the debt the most the debt has ever been raised in history at one time.
This debt seems 2.4 trillion at one time.
I know it's in two tranches.
I know we've got to do this again in December, Thanksgiving, Christmas, whatever December.
But do you think the stomach is going to be either go through this again and okay, rubber stamp it, let's just move on.
If they wanted to get rid of the issue now, they're certainly one of gonna want to get rid of it then and clear the decks for the re-election campaign.
According to the CyberCast News Service, citing records published by the Congressional Research Service.
If the current bill is passed, and the debt limit is increased by 2.4 trillion dollars, the two largest debt limit increases in U.S. history would come in back to back years, both during the presidency of Obama.
And yet the media, I got I'll share with you the stories sometime today.
Media filled with the Tea Party, big winners.
Tea Party, big winner.
It's all designed to get the Tea Party Republicans to vote for the Reed bill that's back in the Senate.
Where are we starting here?
Dennis in San Diego.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you up first on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, thanks, Russ.
Uh, thanks for letting me have a voice.
I'm uh so angry at the Republican leadership, uh, the cowards.
They have subcontracted their taxing authority to some clowns we don't even know who they are.
And I'm I'm just beside myself.
We don't have an opposition party.
We just have a bunch of Papsies who pretend like they're gonna fight for us.
And I've been a Republican all my life.
I'm 60.
I've lost my business.
I lost my house.
I've lost my my health insurance.
And you know, I had a business in ch in China, and my business there was much more free than my business here.
I could create a profit.
The only thing I had to do was I had to bribe the communist officials in the region in the town.
Right.
And every year we'd go through the dinner and the bribes.
Yeah, and promise not to have more than one child.
Yeah.
But we're we're already communist here.
We we don't have a say because our leadership won't fight for us.
Appreciate the call, Dennis.
We'll be back.
Dingy Harry, uh, let's listen to this.
Press conference up on Capitol Hill, a reporter said, Dingy Harry, after this deal gets done, is there need for comprehensive deficit reduction.
The answer is not only yes, but hell yes.
We've made a step forward, and that's good.
As everyone knows, the idea of the joint committee was my proposal.
I'm glad that Senator McConnell has put his arms around this.
I hope that we can get something done.
I was just told as I was walking out of this, I hope it doesn't affect the vote over there today.
But I was told that Representative Cantor said that he looked I just walked out of here, maybe I'm wrong, but somebody just told me that uh Cantor said that revenue very well could be part of what we do with the joint committee.
So Dingy Harry saying he heard that Eric can't a republic, yeah.
When we get to the joint committee, yeah.
Uh could be revenue enhancement.
Could very well a Republican leader.
That's Dingy Harry.
So obviously this is going to now require a reaction from Eric Cantor at uh at some point.
When that happens.
Hutchinson, Kansas.
Hey Jamie, welcome, EIB network.
Happy to have you here.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
I'm an anniversary uh listener, and I think I've got the shorthand version of all this down pat, which is that Obama gets to kill the economy, raise taxes, and blame it all on the Republicans.
Well, he's gonna try.
I mean, that's I don't know if he's gonna get away with it, but that's the narrative.
There's no question that that's what the n because the economy is not going to improve.
And he's going to say that the that that uh they're gonna carry this illusion forward that there are all these massive budget cuts.
And and and uh cuts in government spending.
And he'll be able to say, see, uh it didn't help, it hadn't done anything.
Uh Republican way uh just doesn't work.
I I I it it's all gonna depend on he's not gonna get away with that here.
He and I uh he's not gonna get away with it hopefully with a Republican presidential nominee, but that's that's what the narrative is gonna be.
I I I don't mean to imply, and I'm sorry if you inferred this, that he's got a slam dunk victory as a result of this.
I I I he's at 40 in the polls.
He's gonna try to make it look like all this is the Republicans.
Republicans are thinking that they're winning big, because they're the only ones that took it seriously and came up with reasonable proposals and everything else.
Uh we just have to wait and see how the campaigns roll out, who says what, who's proud of what they've done and who isn't, and so forth.
But what's a question, Mr. Snerdley?
Well, if this doesn't pass the House tonight, uh I don't know.
I if it doesn't pass the House tonight, then I mean there's gonna be real panic set in.
Well, there's not gonna be a default.
That's another thing.
We keep hearing this default business.
There will not be a default Obama and Treasury already have a contingency plan to pay the bondholders.
There isn't gonna be a default.
The The correct way to categorize what would happen would be to say that's a partial government shutdown.
And those happen frequently.
But there isn't going to be a default.
Even so, the people at Moodis are out saying that this is nowhere near enough.
It's all over the Drudge Report.
It's all over everywhere.
The rating services, the credit rating services, are saying this isn't anywhere near enough to protect the triple A rating.
Unless somebody can play some political chicanery.
Standard and poorest guy being a good friend of Obama, the Democrats.
I don't know, but but there isn't going to be a default.
There never there never was going to be a default.
In fact, Iesterday afternoon, I got home.
I was away for the uh weekend.
I got home very tired and worn out.
I get home about two o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday.
I was exhausted.
And I sat down, I started this catching up on some stuff, and I got a note saying that a ranking member wanted to talk to me.
So the ranking member called and spelled out the deal here, what it was, and why it was a winner, and best we could do with one third government that we control and all that.
And said the best thing is that we're we're assured now of uh avoiding default.
I remember saying, but there isn't going to be a default unless Obama wants there to be.
There's a contingency plan to make payments.
We've got revenue coming in.
Didn't matter.
The ranking member didn't want to take the chance that even if there's no default, Obama says we're in default and blames the Republicans.
They told you last week that they were operating in the basis of fear.
And the fear, the real fear that they're operating under is that debt limit, or the default, rather, resulting in a downgrade of the full faith and credit of the U.S. They don't want to go anywhere near it.
They don't want to be part of it, they don't want to be close to it.
They don't want to do anything that would allow that to be said.
So that's the barrel that the regime had them over.
Everything else was almost inconsequential.
That was the thing that was animating them.
Yeah, so tomorrow is default day.
Tomorrow, you know, this is Ramadan.
That was default day one, Ramadan.
Now tomorrow's August the second.
And if the House doesn't vote for this thing, why do you think they won't?
You think they're listening to this show?
Yeah.
Well, there, I guarantee there are a lot of Republicans who voted for Boehner 3.0 who are now making noises about not voting for this.
Plus, you've got the Democrats making their hey about sugar-coated Satan sandwich.
Again, Emmanuel Cleaver with uh with that one.
You do have some far left wing blogs all ticked off.
The reason they're ticked off is because there are supposedly the possibility of cuts in Medicare and uh and some of the entitlements.
And they all they all they also think, yeah, they're they're upset.
No, no, no, no.
They're upset that they don't think there's gonna be a tax increase.
They they think they're buying the notion that tax increases are not possible.
See, they're they're just plum idiots.
They those as best I can figure.
The reason why they're upset on the left is that the Medicare cuts, They think it all ought to be in defense and none in the entitlements.
And they do believe the mechanisms in place to prevent any tax increase.
And that's all they want is a tax increase.
New York Times.
Let me find it here.
Yeah, let me take a break.
New York Times is fit to be tight over this.
New York Times ticked as hell.
I'll find it.
Let me take a brief time out.
We'll do that and come back and we will resume before you know it.
Do not go away.
Okay, a note from Capitol Hill.
Dear Rush, a couple of quick points on taxes.
The Democrats have tried to raise taxes multiple times over the past year, and they have failed.
And with this economy and this Republican majority in the House, they'll fail again.
Anything that is reported out of this new committee would have to be approved by the House Republican majority.
The committee itself, by itself, cannot raise taxes.
That's true.
What Republican is going to vote to raise taxes at the beginning of a party primary season.
Conservatives would crush them.
On the Bush tax cuts, since the Democrats were prevented from separating the top two rates, they're going to face a vote on extending all cuts as one package.
The only way they aren't extended is if Obama vetoes or Senate Democrats block them.
Neither of those things happened last December when they had 59 Democrat senators.
It isn't likely that they'll reverse that in an election year with a terrible economy.
This goes to my point that the Bush tax cuts might be extended.
So this note is trying to correct me in saying that the likelihood of a tax increase is very unlikely.
So let me explain again.
As for the Bush tax cuts, the Democrats were prevented from separating the top two rates last December.
They're going to face a vote on extending all cuts as one package.
The only way they aren't extended is if Obama vetoes or the Senate Democrats block them, and neither of those things happened last December.
Last December Democrats had 59 votes, and they still extended the Bush tax cuts.
This is why I opened the program by suggesting that it is possible the Bush tax cuts will not sunset.
And then CBS or CBO is going to score that as a $5.3 trillion cut.
So now the debt commission or this super special commission sees this, says, well, we got a shortfall here, $5.3 trillion.
We've got to make it up, we've got to raise taxes.
They propose a tax increase.
The theory is it'll never pass the House, particularly in election year.
No Republican House is going to vote for a tax increase in an election year.
So this note is meant to reinforce the notion that there aren't any tax increases in this deal.
And I'm just presenting this stuff to you as it is presented to me.
I report, I decide.
Thank you.
You figure it out.
Now, as to the New York Times...
I think the outrage here, I think, is faked, but there is plenty of outrage.
It's uh it's uh it's an editorial to escape chaos, a terrible deal.
There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House accept that it happened at all.
The deal would avert a catastrophic government default immediately and probably through the end of 2012.
The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists.
It'll hurt programs to the middle class and poor and hinder an economic recovery.
It's not yet set in stone, and there may still be time to make it better.
But in the end.
Most Democrats will have no choice but to swallow their fury, accept a deal, and we hope fight harder the next time.
Now, surely this outrage has got to be faked here.
Even the editors at the New York Times can't be this far removed from reality.
This is just an attempt here to make the deal seem more reasonable and more centrist than it really is.
I think the Times is playing sister soldier for uh for uh dingy Harry and Barack Obama.
Back to their editorial.
For weeks, ever since House Republicans said that they would not raise the nation's debt ceiling without huge spending cuts.
Democrats have held out for a few basic principles.
There must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a fair share of the burden, and Medicare cannot be affected.
Notice the New York Times calls principles always boils down to raising taxes.
It always does.
But how about this?
The New York Times, in a lead editorial talking about the hostage taking demands of Republican extremists.
This is continuing this outlandish, outrageous.
Didn't get the memo on civility kind of talk that the Democrats began last week.
The New York Times has never written that way about Muslim terrorists.
They never have referred to them as hostage-taking extremists.
Never.
But Republican Tea Partiers, it's exactly what the Times calls them.
And Muslim terrorists fly airplanes into buildings.
They set bombs on their kids with timers and they blow them and anybody near them up.
And the New York Times will not refer to them as extremists or terrorists.
New York Times doesn't like it when our politicians actually listen to the people.
So they they're calling for Obama here in this space.
They're calling for Obama to take on dictatorial powers and raise the debt limit by his own authority.
They're calling for the 14th Amendment.
They're telling Obama screw these Republican extremists, screw these hostage takers.
Screw these radicals and lunatics and extortionists.
The New York Times, the paper of record, people like Thomas Loopy Friedman and Paul Ferret face Krugman.
He does.
He looks like a ferret.
Have you noticed that?
Some ferrets are cute.
I mean, they look like weasels, but some of them are cute.
He's even got the twitchy nose.
Like a like a ferret has.
These people have become completely unhinged.
The New York Times has become the voice of the lunatic fringe.
I suspect this is really one of the main reasons why Sheila Jackson Lee and Debbie Blabbermo Schultz and all the other Democrats are unhinged today is because the New York Times is in their uh in their lead editorial.
Democrats can look forward to the expiration of Bush tax cuts next year, and they'll have to make the case in the 2012 elections for new lawmakers who will undo the damage.
New York Times unhappy with Democrat incumbents.
They think with Obama and the gifts that he has, and the majority in the Senate, and these inexperienced Tea Party people that we ought to be re Being rolled.
It's fascinating, I think, actually, to uh look at how both sides are analyzing the results of this.
And if the House doesn't pass it tonight, folks, tomorrow's gonna be a lot of fun.
Just enough time to say we have no more time left in this busy broadcast hour, but we have lots of time coming up in the next hour.
And we make most of every precious broadcast second.
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