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Aug. 3, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:15
August 3, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Greetings, welcome back.
Great to have you.
As always, Rush Limbaugh, the most listened-to radio talk show in the country, serving humanity.
With half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair, I am America's real anchor man, the doctor of democracy, and America's truth detector, all combined into one harmless, lovable little fuzzball.
Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882.
The email address LRushbo at EIBnet.com.
I, ladies and gentlemen, thinking about this super committee, this congressional committee, as a way of explaining this.
I haven't endeavored to do so up to now because this, I think all this is meaningless BS.
But here's basically what it is.
We had a caller who basically forced me to apply myself into translating this for you, making the complex understandable.
And I think it's real simple.
The super committee is simply this.
It is the Democrats' way of making the Republicans decide between Defense Department cuts or tax increases.
Because if there's a deadlock among members of the committee, remember, six and six, six Democrats, six Republicans.
They've got to come up with a trillion and a half dollars worth of cuts in order to give Obama the second tranche of the debt increase, the debt limit increase.
If they deadlock, then the trigger is defense cuts, discretionary cuts, and so forth.
They are counting on the fact that in an election year, no Republican is going to sit idly by while there are massive cuts in the Department of Defense.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are going to say, well, if you're not going to go along with that trigger in order to and we're going to certainly not go along with the discretionary stuff, then we're going to have to come up with a way of getting to a trillion and a half dollars somehow.
And so it wouldn't be difficult where it could be proposed.
Remember, nothing's written in stone.
They can come up with anything they want.
It is said no tax increase, but that's out the window if they all agree to one.
So I think it's just, it's a trick in a way.
It's a way to get the Republicans to decide between cuts to the Department of Defense or tax increases.
Pure and simple.
We'll see.
Because there are two phases of this.
Around Thanksgiving and then December 27th or 28th around Christmas time.
So it won't be long, and we'll all understand.
Well, but there won't be – there's no killing Medicare because the bill is written in such a way that recipients will not be cut.
Medicare providers will be cut.
The cuts in Medicare will not be to any recipients, only to providers, doctors, hospitals, and the like.
No recipients.
That's stipulated in the bill.
So there aren't any Medicare cuts in terms of recipients, just providers.
You didn't know that.
Well, now you do.
Of course it's dastardly.
The whole thing is dastardly.
But beyond all of that, here we are just one day later, and we've got three different news stories about how this deal is responsible for a new recession because of all the so-called spending cuts in this deal.
Oh, no, we didn't think about this.
Oh, gosh.
You know what?
We didn't think about the massive spending cuts, of which there are none, could cause us to go back into recession.
Reuters is one of these.
There are two Reuters stories, and there is another one from Challenger J. Christmas.
There are three of them out there.
And then we've got the additional stories of more layoffs this summer.
And while all this is going on, Obama flies back to Chicago, ignores Ramadan to have a birthday party.
He's ignoring Ramadan.
Snirdly, it makes total sense.
Soldiers and doctors are not Democrat constituents for the most part.
So what do they care about that choice?
Defense, well, we're not going to get to the point where there are no doctors by this Thanksgiving or Christmas.
We're just talking about this next way to grow government and have more spending.
I want to go to the audio sound bites here.
And we go back to this program and me, May 21st, 2008.
This is before, obviously, the election.
And this is what I was warning people about.
May 21st, 2008.
It's going to be Jimmy Carter's second term.
They don't care about ruining the country.
We're running against people who want doom and gloom to happen.
I said this in May of 2008.
The election was in November.
Here's Obama yesterday at the White House speaking about the unemployment rate and the economy.
There's already a quiet crisis going on in the lives of a lot of families and a lot of communities all across the country.
They're looking for work, and they have been for a while.
Or they're making do with fewer hours or fewer customers.
Or they're just trying to make ends meet.
That ought to compel Washington to cooperate.
That ought to compel Washington to compromise, and it ought to compel Washington to act.
This is after Washington compromised.
This is after Washington acted.
But here's Obama.
There's a quiet crisis going on in the lives of a lot of families in a lot of communities all across the country, a quiet crisis.
Yes, it's called Obamaville.
And this crisis is not so quiet.
It is a crisis that everybody's aware of.
It's a crisis that he caused.
This is essentially, I think, Obama's Malays speech.
Let's go back and listen to Jimmy Carter, July 15th, 1979.
It is a crisis of confidence.
It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national world.
We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
You ever notice it's always Democrat presidents making these kinds of speeches?
It's always Democrat presidents.
Quiet crisis going on.
Looking for work, and they have been for a while, making do with fewer hours, trying to make ends meet.
Carter, crisis of confidence, a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
This is after four years of his term.
Jimmy Carter describing the country after four years of his leadership.
They see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation in his own term, his own second term of Barack Obama.
So here we go.
CBS News.
Dean Reynolds, national correspondent, had a report about the federal debt deal and the lack of unemployment benefits in the law.
There's a lot of people out there who are unemployed who thought that they were going to have their unemployment benefits extended, and they weren't.
So Dean Reynolds goes out there.
CBS sent their reporters into the squalor of Obamaville.
First in Chicago, where they don't even have cars to live in.
59-year-old Kevin Kalmas lives alone in her foreclosed home, paging through a bumper crop of August bills and wondering what Congress was thinking.
I truly, truly don't understand both the hubris in it and the lack of compassion and empathy.
I don't understand where these people come from.
Unemployed as a production manager, she was hoping there would be something in the legislation that dealt with chronic joblessness and specifically with jobless benefits.
Hers run out in December.
I always felt good when I had my car because I kept telling everybody, you know, at least I could live in my car and go places and everybody would just be chagrined at that.
But I had to surrender my car.
So now literally when this place is gone, I have no place to live.
CBS reporters out documenting Obamaville after a debt limit bill that was supposedly our salvation.
Right.
She wanted a stimulus.
Yeah, she thought there was going to be stimulus in this.
She thought that's what it was all about.
That woman, Kevin Kalmas, she thought that there was stimulus in this.
She thought it was another Obama stash that was being voted on.
She thought it was another round of unemployment benefits that was, and that's why she was prepared to think the Republicans were all mean-spirited and extreme because they were opposing them.
That's what she thought it was.
She didn't get a handout, none.
So CBS Evening News, again, they sent Byron Pitts to Thomasville, North Carolina, another capital of Obamaville.
The woman, Brenda Watford, who feeds 1,500 children in need every summer day.
For a lot of people in Thomasville, hard times go back generations.
My mom, one day, she was like six, and there's six other brothers and sisters, and she's standing on a chair, and she's boiling water to pour dirt in for them to have dirt soup.
I just can't imagine anybody having to go through anything like that.
And so I cannot stand thoughts of anybody being hungry.
If you could go to Washington and talk to Congress, talk to President Obama, what would you say?
I would ask him to please let every child in America eat a free breakfast and free lunch every day.
It's awful expensive, isn't it?
It's not expensive when you're feeding.
We're feeding our future.
CBS Evening News in Obamaville seeking solutions to our problems where every child in America should eat a free breakfast and a free lunch every day.
Don't they practically in school already do that?
Even in summertime, some of the schools are open for free lunch and free breakfast.
They get free snack.
His woman tells a story about her mother making dirt soup.
Dirt soup?
Nutrition?
Well, yeah, if they've had enough insects in it, it could be nutritious.
Yeah.
I wonder what they told him it was.
They're making dirt soup.
Here, little Johnny, here's your soup today.
What kind of soup is it?
It's dirt soup, little Johnny.
Dirt soup.
That's right.
What's in dirt soup?
Dirt, little Johnny.
It says dirt.
We've heated up some water.
We put some dirt in there.
Dirt, you know, it's very good.
If you cut your head, rub some dirt, stops the bleeding, just eat it.
I don't want to eat dirt soup.
Shut up, little Johnny, and eat the dirt soup.
It's all we can afford.
Let's go to a flashback.
You think things are different back in 2009?
This is Detroit.
Our man there, WJR, Ken Rogalski, interviewing two people in line for stimulus cash.
Why are you here?
To get some money.
What kind of money?
Obama money.
Where's it coming from?
Obama.
And where did Obama get it?
I don't know.
His stash.
I don't know.
I don't know where he got it from.
But he's giving it to us to help us.
We love him.
That's why we voted for him.
Obama.
Obama.
Right.
So we now move on.
Well, you remember all that.
Obama stash.
I can remember when we aired that.
I said, if I were president and that's going, I'd be embarrassed.
I'd be humiliated.
Obama looks at that success.
So we have here a montage of the Washington intelligentsia lamenting that the system is broken.
We have F. Chuck Todd, Maria Barcharomo, a number of other people here talking about the federal debt negotiations in the American political system.
If the debt debate proved one thing to America, it's that Washington, at least in their minds, is broken.
Is this unprecedented debate?
He said, she said back and forth, a sign that Washington is broken.
We've got to fix our broken political system.
A lot of Americans were wondering whether Washington was broken.
This place seems so irretrievably broken.
The system is broken.
Exactly.
Exactly.
System's broken.
Nope.
System is not broken.
Folks, the system is the greatest ever created by man.
It is the people running the system who are broken.
It is the people running the system that are the problem, not the system.
Back to the phones of Manhattan.
This is Ralph.
Nice to have you on the program, Ralph.
Welcome.
Rush, thank you.
If you think this man is going to be ousted in 2012, I'm afraid you're highly mistaken.
The allegiance to this man, no matter what he does, no matter how incapable he is, Rush, is unwavering.
I'm just going by my experience here where I live and circles that I run in.
And, you know, If you're running a candidate, a milquetoast candidate, the likely candidate, which I think will be Romney, who will stand there and not speak in a forthright fashion.
He won't challenge him on all his shortcomings.
Rush, we don't stand a chance.
It's tough to get an incumbent out of there in the first place.
Let's be realistic about this, Rush.
You have 50% of this country on the dole.
They're takers.
Those are the Obama hardcore fans.
They are in lockstep with him no matter what he does, Rush.
I'm afraid to say those words.
I really regret saying those words.
I'm afraid it's the truth.
Well, there's one caveat here, Ralph.
I don't blame you for feeling the way you feel.
You live in New York.
It is not possible for you to encounter people who don't think that way.
80% of New York does think and does vote the exact way that you have described Obama.
I just got in my email a little note here from Dick Morris, not to me.
It's one of his blast emails.
He pretty much pronounces Obama DOA in 2012, that the left is abandoned, the left is embarrassed, that the left is fed up with Obama's pathetic incompetence when he didn't have a teleprompter.
That this budget performance of his was an absolute embarrassment, that they're fit to be tied.
He hasn't done anything that he said he was going to do.
And that it's just a fait accompli, according to Dick Morris and his polling data, that Obama's finished.
He's a total washout.
Rush, people vote for inane reasons.
They vote because they like the looks of the candidate, the way he's speaking.
I understand what you're saying.
I just don't think it's a slam dunk yet.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Let's stick with the audio sound bites.
We're up to number 10 here.
This was this morning on Morning Joe, and the guest, Chief White House correspondent F. Chuck Todd.
And they were having a discussion about the economy.
And the co-host, Willie Geist, said, F. Chuck, the president yesterday in the Rose Garden said that he wants to turn the page to jobs and the economy.
Then how can these guys look at each other with a straight face?
How many times has Obama turned the page to the economy?
How many times has he focused like a laser on the economy?
How many times have these guys reported that that's what Obama has done?
If these guys, Willie Guy said, F. Chuck, if they had any journalistic credibility, they'd be talking about Obama's incompetence at dealing with jobs and the economy.
Two and a half years, ladies and gentlemen, Obama's been laser-like focused on jobs.
He's had all these job summits.
He even had one with Thomas Lupe Friedman from the New York Times.
These guys report this as though, wow, hey, guess what?
We got news here.
Obama's focusing on jobs.
So they talk about this as though they've never talked about it before.
And Willie Geist says, you know, this is a perilous turning of the page for Obama.
Obama wants to turn the page to jobs.
a perilous thing to him to do F. Chuck.
Why do you care, Willie?
That's a perilous thing for him.
See, Willie Geist does not want Obama to turn to jobs because Obama can't win on jobs.
Obama is a net job killer.
And so Willie Geist says, gosh, F. Chuck, he wants to turn to this.
Oh, my God.
How are we going to protect him here, F. Chuck?
And then Willie Geist, talking to F. Chuck, quotes George Will.
He says, George Will puts out the question that he thinks all Republican presidential candidates should be asking on the trail this morning, is this really the best we can do?
We get bad GDP numbers.
We've got revised numbers.
We're going to have a July jobs number on Friday.
Probably won't be great.
How does President Obama answer that question, F. Chuck?
Is this the best we can do over the next year?
This economy has to contract for a little bit before it can expand again.
We only talk about the tech bubble or the real estate bubble.
It was bubbled up everywhere, whether it was people making too much money on Wall Street because salaries got out of whack and then that messed things up.
The whole country just needs to contract a little bit.
And the only thing that can soften the blow is if somehow global demand goes up.
I don't think there's any plan that any president or member of Congress could actually put into place that actually helps.
They could just do plans that don't hurt.
And that's what passes for news.
There's nothing anybody can do.
This is as good as it gets.
And you know why we can't do it if it's all those salaries that the Wall Street guys made, they just messed everything up.
How about your salary, F. Chuck?
All those salaries that Wall Street made, man, it just missed everything.
Poor old Obama.
I mean, there really isn't anything.
There's no plan any member of Congress could come up with.
Now, that's just downright, folks, I am not comfortable speaking this way.
These guys all hear about what I say.
And F. Chuck, he's a nice guy, but this is just plain stupid to not know that there are things to do that create growth scenarios for an economy?
To not know that or to profess to not know that?
I know what to do to grow the economy.
I can think of some things to announce today that would cause an immediate reversal in the stock market and in the employers of this country starting to think about hiring people.
You could have a tax freeze.
He said, the economy's got to contract a little more before it can get, but it's got to contract some more.
What is that?
We have been contracting for three years and we're still not through contracting.
We need more contraction.
We got to get smaller before we can start growing.
That's the cure.
That's what we get from NBC.
Here's Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich on MSNBC.
He was on last night with Lawrence O'Donnell.
They were talking about the debt deal.
O'Donnell says, what have we done to the economy with this legislation?
The president has essentially tied his hands in the hands of Congress with regard to boosting the economy.
Right now, I don't have to tell you, joblessness is huge.
The economy is not growing.
So you need a boost from the government.
You need, in my view, a WPA, a civilian conservation corps, maybe exempting the first $10,000 or $20,000 of income from payroll taxes.
But given this deal, it's going to be terribly difficult, if not impossible, to muster the political will, the political courage, the votes necessary to get a jobs bill through.
I just sit here in absolute stunned amazement.
We are three and a half years into failed job policy after failed job policy after failed job policy.
And former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, proposes more of the same.
A WPA, a civilian conservation corps.
Yeah, let's get everybody in uniform streeting, sweeping the streets like the THICOMs do in Beijing.
The only thing that can be done is government.
Government has to do this deal.
Obama, poor Obama, his hands are tied with this deal.
And what Reich means by that is that poor old Obama, he can't spend anymore.
Young people don't know what WPA is.
I don't know what that is.
You don't want to know.
If you don't know what the WPA is, you don't want to know.
You don't want to know what the Tennessee Valley Authority is.
You don't want to know what the TVA is.
You don't want to know.
You don't want Civilian Conservation Corps.
You don't want to know what those things are.
They're Marxist.
You don't want to know what they are.
They're from the 30s and 40s.
This is what's passing for a thing.
Here's Krauthammer.
Charles Krauthammer last night taking time out from Krauthammer Review Online to appear on the All-Star panel at Fox News.
Bret Baer said, while the economy's weak and fragile, now the talk, the focus again, pivots to jobs, finding jobs, trying to see even Fox falls.
The template is set.
No matter where you go, talk now.
Jobs, what's government going to do about jobs?
So the president mentioned it today.
He's mentioned the job thing numerous times before.
Can it happen, Charles?
Can it happen?
He said it before.
He's out of bullets.
He's out of arrows.
He's looking for stones on the seashore.
And it shows that he may want to have a jobs agenda.
He may want to do a pivot.
There's nothing left in the cupboard.
He did a huge Keynesian gamble and it failed.
Yeah.
Well, he did do a Keynesian gamble, but it's worse than a Keynesian gamble.
As I said at the beginning of the program, you know, John Maynard Keynes, Keynes, however you want to pronounce it, he really, his whole theory of spending, government spending was oriented in relatively good economic times to eliminate business cycles.
John Maynard Keynes is really getting a bad name being associated with Obama because he was not out to destroy capitalism.
He was wrong.
His policies were totally wrong and destructive, but he was not purposely trying to destroy the American family.
Obama is.
And I hate to disagree here with Dr. Krauthammer, but Obama's got plenty of Keynesian spending left.
What do you think the debt limit deal was all about?
He wants more spending.
He made another push for more stimulus.
That's exactly what he talks about, balance, shared sacrifice.
He's asking for more stimulus.
He wants more money to spend, and he knows full well that it's going to result in exactly more of what we have.
He knows it's not going to create.
He knows he's taking money out of the private sector, and he knows that taking money out of the private sector does not create jobs in the private sector.
He knows this.
That's why all of this is purposeful.
All right, my friends, I got to take a brief time out.
We'll do that here.
We will continue with much more on the Rush Limbaugh program right after this.
Dear son of a...
Listen to this.
This is just a moment ago.
At the White House, Obama speaking with reporters before meeting with his cabinet.
Thousands of FAA workers being furloughed, including safety inspectors.
It also means projects all across the country involving tens of thousands of construction workers being suspended because Congress didn't get its work done.
Here's what also happens.
It turns out that this extension gives the authority to collect fees from airlines.
The airlines are still collecting these fees because it's priced into their tickets, but they're not turning them over to the federal government, and the federal government stands to lose $200 million a week.
No.
That would be $8 billion at a time when we're worrying about how we pay for everything from education to Head Start.
Oh, yeah.
Education, Head Start, bringing in the kids.
Oh, yeah.
Airlines are collecting all the revenue, but they're not turning it over to the federal government.
You are not the Pope.
You are not the Vatican.
Everything doesn't get turned over to you.
Let me tell you what this is about.
This is about the FAA and this temporary shutdown.
And the reason it's shut down, a temporary shutdown, because of the Democrats.
There's this thing.
It's called the Essential Air Service Program.
And what it is, it's just like a subsidy for people that live in the sticks for phone service.
This is a subsidy for people that live in the sticks to be able to fly at reasonable prices.
If you live certain, if it's 90 miles or more from an airport, you get subsidized for your ticket for certain routes.
Like one of the routes is the EES program subsidizes a rural airport in Lewiston, Montana.
In 2007, that airport reported that it averaged 0.6 passengers per flight.
Last year, an EAS route between Atlanta and Macon made many flights without a single passenger on board, which resulted in an annual per-passenger subsidy of $464 to the airline to keep that route running.
In Kansas, EAS pays three airports in Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal Kansas to stay open.
All are within 75 miles of each other.
The Republicans want to get rid of this subsidy.
The Democrats say no.
They want the pork in it.
It's the Democrats are the reason why there's this partial shutdown of the FAA.
This is also known as the Rockefeller Bill because he lives a certain distance from an airport.
I wish I had more time to explain this in greater detail.
But he's trying to claim the airlines are making out like bandits here by not turning over money as the Congress didn't do their job.
The Democrats that did not do their job because they're trying to hold on to subsidizing routes that nobody flies.
Also, they can say that they're helping poor people.
Pure and simple.
That's all this is about.
They're caterwalling and depriving the federal government of $200 million.
Good.
Good.
Wish it was $400 billion a week they were being deployed or whatever it is.
Yeah, I had a great Sarah Palin soundbite.
I was going to play it in Obama to make that stupid statement about this stupid subsidy of rural airline routes that the Democrats refused to get rid of.
Wailing and moaning about the federal government being deprived of $200 billion and this adds up to a billion dollars and then we're trying to head start an education for our kids.
Anyway, Sarah Palin said all this talk about terrorists and stuff.
Democrats calling us terrorists.
Why, if that's true, Obama would love us.
He'd love to pall around with us.
His friends are terrorists like Bill Ayers.
It was a great line and we'll be back.
Yeah, you know, if I keep talking Keynesian, I got to be very careful.
People are going to keep accusing me of saying Obama wasn't born here in America.
A lot of people think Keynesian they're going to confuse it with Kenya.
Yeah, you got to be careful as hosts of these shows, folks.
You got to be very, very careful.
You know how many people don't know what Keynesian is?
They may be thinking, I was not saying he was born in Kenya.
Okay.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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